


The Bards' Gamut

by sanura



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Academia, Geraskier Exchange 2020, M/M, Mystery, Oxenfurt, Poetry, even worse, in excessively technical detail, just a lot of medieval and renaissance poetic terminology, musical academia, of a sort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:35:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25883722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanura/pseuds/sanura
Summary: Jaskier has always been ambitious. Sometimes he achieves greatness. Geralt can admit that, when he has to.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 108
Kudos: 334
Collections: Geraskier Exchange





	The Bards' Gamut

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nemainofthewater](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemainofthewater/gifts).



> Written in Geraskier Exchange 2020 for Nemainofthewater upon four of their five prompts. I got a little carried away. I hope you like it.
> 
> Many thanks and much gratitude to J for a generous beta. Mistakes remain my own.

If it weren't for the Bards' Gamut, Geralt would likely never have come to Oxenfurt again.

It was an early spring event, held every four years for the magisterial dignity of the Oxenfurt arts professors to preside over the travelling rabble and their extremely varied performances. Every bard, troubadour, player and poet who was anyone, and had the wherewithal to get from the circuit to the Academy, did so in a Gamut year. 

This year was Jaskier's first participating as both judge and competitor (in separate categories, naturally), and Geralt believed him when he said there would be consequences for missing it. Nobody wanted a satirical chanson about how to tame a white wolf-cub by petting its fur to make the rounds of the salons of Redanian nobility this season. Or any season.

Oxenfurt wasn't Geralt's scene in early spring at the best of times. It was a big enough city for the smells of the street to be obnoxious, but not big enough for anonymity. The pungent memories he retained of slaying its unique giant sewer-toad monster years ago were bad enough, and it was on the complete opposite end of Redania, let alone Kaedwen, from Geralt's overwinter haven at Kaer Morhen. 

The trip south over the gritty slush and hard-packed icy trails, past more than one decent (though not urgent) contract, and taking a few on speculation when he had no choice but to defend himself, had been worse than uncomfortable. Especially when the monsters were venomous. Or nocturnal. At least Roach got to sleep overnight when he was keeping overgrown bugs at bay. And she didn't have to deal with toxicity hangovers when the bugs just wouldn't go down and he had to take too much White Raffard's.

He'd never knowingly overextend Roach, but he had pushed her to the limits of her abilities to get here in time for the opening concert. Which Jaskier was supposed to be in.

He had couched it in terms of professional responsibility. He said it was about the prestige of having his long-term muse present in the hour of his triumph, or some such flattering nonsense, but Geralt could admit (though perhaps not aloud) that no matter how famous Jaskier had made his witcherly exploits, Jaskier was still more famous in himself, and, even if having a grimly imposing white-haired figure in his audience was any kind of advantage in competition, it was likely more a matter of friendship and reassurance that Jaskier wanted Geralt here.

So why wasn't Jaskier declaiming pompously from the dais in Oxenfurt's largest plaza? The crowd smelled variously of anticipation, fried pork-and-cabbage dumplings, surprisingly well-washed humanity, and Mahakaman spirit (someone must have broken out the strong booze for the occasion). The air was restless, but, for once, not in a sharp-edged, dangerous way, and no one was paying Geralt any mind, not even to mutter "mutant" and spit reflexively at his feet. Some Toussaintois popinjay in a gold-and-purple doublet more garish than even the worst of Jaskier's, with an accent so plummy you could make preserves with it, was warbling endlessly on the stand instead of Jaskier.

"And a fine day it is here in Oxenfurt, weather fit to grace even my beloved Beauclair, a grand blessing here in the North, on this most auspicious day. You may know me, or you may not--I am Adrien de Rouleau, Le Papillon, arrived this very morn from the Tourney Grounds where I am wont to herald the finest chivalry of the Duchy of Toussaint, and so I am here to herald the finest bards and players in all the Northern Kingdoms!"

The puffed shirt paused for applause, which, to Geralt's surprise, was immediately forthcoming. Perhaps people did know him. They seemed enthusiastic he was here to announce things, at least.

"Yes, the finest musicians, poets, and dramatists of all, and it is my very good honor as your herald, Le Papillon, to tell you of them!"

Le Papillon was vamping. Geralt could tell. His manner was officiously dignified, holding the happy crowd's attention, but much less personably than Geralt had ever seen Jaskier work a room. And it became more obvious, as the herald announced, with increasing attention to detail, every act slated to perform in the opening ceremony, that it wasn't just Geralt's impatience, or the customary delay to the start of a formal concert so that highborn patrons could arrive fashionably late without missing anything--it was a stall. 

Something was up with Jaskier, whose dream for at least a decade had been to open the Bards' Gamut in Oxenfurt with a decent song--or, as he put it, "something less formally constrained than a virelai, more heartfelt than an ode, and less soppy than an alba." Geralt didn't know what any of those were, but he wasn't sure that deviating from them would be as revolutionary as Jaskier made it sound.

Maybe it was some kind of performance tactic, showing up late to his most coveted gig? No. Jaskier didn't play coy. He was unnervingly straightforward with his pursuits, emotional, musical, or otherwise. Where was he? Geralt disguised his growing discomfort with practiced calm. It was one thing to be annoyed by an inconvenient trip to see a man fulfill a dream, but it was another to be horrified watching him miss his chance at it. Was he in some kind of danger? Was that why he'd asked Geralt to come, after all? Perhaps it was silly to have thought Jaskier wanted him here as a friend--

No! There he was!

Jaskier swaggered gaily onto the platform in a glittering golden doublet Geralt recognized but could tell he'd had re-tailored in the current fashion. Jaskier cut Le Papillon off without seeming to, ever the courtly and charismatic attention magnet. Geralt sagged a little with relief. The man standing and craning his neck behind Geralt seemed to appreciate it, so he hunched a little further. The sun was just past its zenith, high enough not to be in anybody's eyes as they watched the dais, no matter where they stood in the plaza. And there were people everywhere, some hanging off the balconies and out of the windows of the higher stories in the square who, Geralt was sure, didn't live there. It really was crowded. The concert, and the festival, were starting.

"Fine and stately gentlefolk of every station, it is your Oxenfurt Academy Professor of Music, the legendary composer of the Cintran Cycle, it is your Continent-wide pilgrim of plainsong the Viscount of Lettenhove, it is your peregrinator of poetry Julian Alfred Pankratz, it is Jaskier! The Gamut begins!" Le Papillon bowed himself off the stage and gestured Jaskier forward with an expansive flourish.

Jaskier stepped to the middle of the dais and acquired a posture Geralt had never seen on him. The crowd's energy, whipped up by the wait and the long introduction, seemed to steep on him like a tincture. He was upright and lightly settled, still as a stag looking into the wind. The fingers of his left hand settled finely between the frets of his instrument--

That was not his instrument.

Jaskier set the crowd silent with an intricately ornamented passage to introduce his melody, but the tone of the lute was sharper, thinner, and more piercing than Geralt had ever heard from him. It carried well in the square, and the people around Geralt all held their breaths and leaned in, but it was a colder sound, and Geralt was taken aback.

Jaskier's voice, at least, was as it should be. Geralt felt his headache dissipate. He hadn't noticed he was having one, but it diffused right out of his mind at the familiar agile and expressive tenor. The words were something ridiculously pompous about Oxenfurt and the history of the Academy, but Jaskier managed to give them enough personality to make the story compelling. It wasn't a song Geralt knew, and he didn't think Jaskier had written it, but he made it his own, the way he did everything. The people on all sides pressed closer, drawn to the strange dignity of the simple tune and its tightly-woven accompaniment. It was enchanting enough that Geralt put a fingertip to his medallion, but the cool metal's stillness confirmed the absence of magic.

The high sun glinted in the depths of Jaskier's hair, turning the color richer and smoother than the shell of a shining chestnut. The golden doublet gleamed to match it, and Geralt was sure it wasn't an accident that the ribbons woven in the strap of the unfamiliar lute were the exact shade of Jaskier's eyes. But here, in this magiclessly spellbound crowd, a bard standing assuredly upright before the majority of the greatest experts in his field, intoning a tune so noble it might as well be ancient, the care looked like respect rather than vanity.

By the end of the performance only Geralt's innate time-sense told him it had been a long song. It was not a long wait. It was not a trial to listen, to watch Jaskier play the crowd as smoothly as he played that complex accompaniment. In fact it was strange, how the time passed unnoticed as Geralt tried to reconcile this nearly stern solemnity with the rascally strut he was accustomed to. The sun had moved nearly ten degrees further across the sky. Jaskier's practiced voice did not suddenly tire after forty minutes, but the burrs and breaks he integrated into his singing grew gradually even more expressive. The final moments of the song were only another careful, precise, and artful sweep across the tune with the lute, but it managed to become a reflection and synthesis of everything that had happened in the words.

Geralt shook himself. He noticed everyone around him making the same return to the flow of time. His medallion was still quiet, when he touched it again. A great rolling wave of applause finally began to build, and crested over the dais to Jaskier's transparent delight. The institutional dignity slipped off him a little, like the opening at the neck of one of his perpetually unbuttoned doublets, and he made a leg and grinned in that way he had, that somehow singled one out and engaged one specifically, while encompassing the entire fervid crowd. He bowed again, and then his raucous swagger settled fully back on him, and he blew a kiss everywhere as he left the stage.

He wasn't hard to find, even in the rush after his performance. Geralt had been worried he might be difficult to get to, among adoring fans, but it wasn't a lot of tracking work to meet him in the alley across from the well, and apparently he was a common enough sight here that even his performance at such a fancy event wasn't going to drown him in adulation. There were a few young ladies trailing after him, and a few older ladies, but Geralt supposed that was to be expected. He wasn't walking very fast.

When he got close enough to distinguish their conversation from the noise of the crowd, though, Geralt realized he'd made the wrong assumptions. 

"The department's not going to be split, Julian; I saw the dean's face when you put the History verse right after the Rhetoric, and the argument can be made--"

"It's not a good argument! I can't keep butting heads with Grenville over the merits of having separate Trouvereship and Poetry faculties, and as vast as my deep well of eloquence is, he's right that it'd be cheaper--"

The most brightly-attired middle-aged woman, imposingly direct and radiating righteous indignation from her well-balanced stance to her craggy face, had built up a head of steam and interrupted Jaskier's rebuttal of what was clearly a familiar refrain. "Let. The students. Vote on it. That's the only way we'll be able to prove to the Academy that the caliber of applications won't drop with such an extravagant expansion of the School of the Arts, besides actually implementing it--"

The youngest-looking woman in the train spoke up. "I can ask the Dean of Medicine to preside over the survey, as the head of an unrelated and disinterested School--"

Jaskier was outraged. "Katarzyna, you're an angel, and I love you, but just because I studied here at the same time as the Dean--"

"It's not even an appraisal year! They can't do all that paperwork at the same time as the Gamut paperwork, even our formidable bureaucracy couldn't handle it," piped up another of the younger ladies.

Geralt saw an opening. "I don't mean to interrupt," he began.

Jaskier looked over his lute case at Geralt, and his face lit like a beacon. "Oh, you're _here_! You made it! I'm so damned glad!"

"Yes. Ah, hello." Geralt approached cautiously, and inclined his head to the gaggle of ladies who must be Academy faculty and students that had some relationship to Jaskier's position. "I'm Geralt of Rivia."

"We _know_ who you _are_ , you dolt." The young lady with the black hair and the blue hose wasn't pulling her conversational punches. "This one _never_ shuts _up_ about you--"

"Charmed, I'm sure," said the striking, pink-and-orange-clad older woman who apparently had a stake in the student vote. She seemed to mean it. She smiled at Geralt like she found him charming, and managed to look down her aquiline nose at him despite being a head and a half shorter. "I'm Tereska Pilch, Professor of Rhetoric. You can call me Tess." She shook his hand, and Geralt let her, bemused. "This is Katya and Tatya, Jaskier's two most promising protegées, and Marieka, one of mine," she continued, indicating the younger women. "That's Hildegarda, she heads the brass faculty at the School of Music, and Alyona, the director of Choral Studies."

Alyona demurred, "It's hardly its own department, here, but all the instrumentalists have to sing for at least two years--"

"But you're not interested in our internecine academic furor, are you, Geralt?" Jaskier cut in, brightly. "If you'll excuse me for a short spell, my highly esteemed colleagues, it's been an unbearable eternity since I last had a drink with this great galloping specimen of musehood, and I'm perishing for a drop after that beast of a song under this beast of a sun."

Tereska--Tess, Geralt supposed--nodded graciously with a knowing smile, even as the students pouted aggressively. Alyona and Hildegarda apparently had practice herding Jaskier's protegées, though, and managed to engage them in a discussion of his performance as they waved politely and set off.

"It's lovely to finally meet you, Geralt," said Hildegarda pleasantly over her shoulder. "I hope we'll talk soon."

Geralt waved hesitantly back. "Sure," he said. Jaskier grabbed his arm, hefted his lute case, and towed him along. The chatter washed over Geralt like a familiar waterfall, slightly ticklish and slightly overwhelming, but not unwelcome.

"You wouldn't _believe_ the shenanigans the administration tries to get up to in a Gamut year, it's a nightmare, it doesn't matter how prestigious your department is the rest of the time, when it comes to the crunch you have to account for every single miniscule move, and you know that's not my strongest suit at the best of times--"

Geralt grunted. "Responsibility?"

"Oh, you'd be surprised. I do all right, when it matters. When it comes down to it," Jaskier looked reprovingly at him.

Geralt _was_ a little surprised. Jaskier had--well, he had protegées. That wasn't the kind of commitment you got, that you made, if you were a bad teacher. He hadn't thought much about what exactly Jaskier did here when he wasn't on the road with him. He had constructed a vague assumption that it must be more of the same, picking away at the structure of new tunes and new lyrics, just... in front of people.

"Hm," he said.

Jaskier dragged him out of the sun and into the barley-scented confines of what was really an absurdly tiny tavern. Geralt had to duck to fit through the door. There was one table, and it had three mismatched chairs around it. The length of the squared-off bartop was sufficient for three pitchers, two cups, and a keg, though Geralt could see headier spirits on the shelves behind. Not a soul stood there, and Jaskier served himself from the second pitcher.

"This is a professors' establishment, in more than one sense. The proprietor's an Academy chemistry lecturer, and he pretty much only lets fellow lecturers in here." He poured a second cup for Geralt. "You're my guest, of course."

Geralt took the cup and sniffed it cautiously. The aroma was not promising. "Thanks," he hedged. "He doesn't stick around to enforce the tab?"

Jaskier gulped a mouthful from his own cup, somewhat hurriedly. "The whole place runs almost entirely on favors, here. I've sung the lavish and extravagant birthday party of the son of his patroness for the last three years, so I'm pretty much set for whatever I want from the counter. The shelf's another story, but I can't get too drunk today, no matter how much I'd love to celebrate my performance."

The flavor was a little better than the smell, but not much. Geralt didn't wince, but he was accustomed to regular draughts made from extremely potent poisons and the livers of monsters. "Huh," he expressed.

"I know, it's hardly up there with the finest of Kaedweni stout, but I don't like to waste nice things on a raging post-show thirst quaff, and this place was close and quiet. We can go to the Hanged Hare later for the best beer in town, though I'll have to stop off at the quad for a disguise."

Geralt raised an eyebrow.

"It was a matter of honor that got me banned, I'll have you know. I wasn't groping for trout in any rivers, peculiar or otherwise."

"All right," Geralt said. He did wonder what the best beer in Oxenfurt might be like. It was a town full of students who wouldn't know any better, to be sure, but it was also home to a lot of the people who knew the most in the world. It was something of a surprise that the chemistry expert's bartop selection wasn't better, actually.

"He's only a junior chemistry lecturer," Jaskier said, apparently reading Geralt's expression. "He has yet to finish his dissertation, even."

Geralt sighed, sat on one of the chairs, and drained his cup. Jaskier looked impressed.

"Overjoyed as I am to see you for reasons entirely unrelated to your professional proficiencies, and much as I detest sullying our intimate reunion with such unworthy matters, I am compelled to ask you for a favor."

Ah, there it was. Jaskier had just explained that the whole place ran on favors. Geralt was curious. "I don't usually work for favors," he said, as a matter of principle, and set his cup upside-down on the table.

"Oh, I know." Jaskier took the two short steps back to the most structurally-sound-looking chair of the two left unoccupied, unslung his case to scoot it gingerly under the table, and sat heavily. "I tried to make sure you'd never have to work for favors again. One of the very first things I did, upon our acquaintance. And if I had the means, I'd never dream of bothering you with this. But I'm about out of useful favors in this regard, and to be honest I don't have the money you're worth. And you did come all this way."

"Yes. As a favor." Geralt looked as serious as he could, which had been known to scare small children.

"I really am glad to see you, you know," Jaskier said quietly, with a smile. Not a come-hither-audience smile, but one of the little, honest half-smiles that just shone out of him when he wasn't performing. "Not because I need your help. I almost always need your help, I guess, in one way or another," he murmured demurely down at the table, and then looked Geralt in the eye.

"I thought you did all right?" Geralt frowned.

"Well, my professorial duties are manifold and multiplying, but not lucrative. I can't play the inns nightly here, the way I would on the road; Oxenfurt is completely saturated with baby bards who both need the practice much more and also cost infinitely less than a bard of my stature, and an Academy Professor, should ask. The hustle for me here is different."

"There's still a hustle? I thought you were, ah, institutional." 

"Yes, but it's not a complete living. Luckily, my professional charms extend far enough to make up the pecuniary shortfall, and I enjoy the patronage of a few genteel windbags of Redanian aristocracy. It's nothing like a court position would be, but they get bragging rights when I blow musical smoke up their arses, and I get enough coin to support my accustomed Oxfurtian sedentary lifestyle."

"You mean, you can afford food."

"Yes. So if I may presume upon our long and storied friendship, I'd still like to be able to afford any when this damnable festival is over. The backup isn't cheap."

"Backup?"

Jaskier gestured to the case that lay carefully positioned under the exact middle of the table, like it was marshaling the legs of furniture as a defense against any attackers. "This isn't mine, Geralt. I'm borrowing it from the Borsody Auction House. Well, I say borrowing." He wiggled his hand, and Geralt got the impression the loan was a favor, but an expensive one. "It's not as nice as mine would be, nor as familiar, but I need it, and it'd be seven months' professorial pay here or a year's takings on the road to buy it, and I don't have that kind of cash to hand unless I plan for it."

Geralt glanced at the case. "I did notice the difference. Is that why you were late?"

Jaskier lit up again. "Ah, not only did you get here in time for the show, you even saw it! It's true, I asked you to the competition partially out of vanity, but I had hoped you'd see me play the opener." His smile was really embarrassingly fond. He seemed to remember himself, that he was asking for something, and it sobered him a little, the way it never had before. "Yes, I was late because of the lute. I had to argue a little harder than I anticipated, to be able to take it with me, and I had to bring it very carefully all the way back from Novigrad. Normal lutes don't like the kind of temperature change you get outdoors overnight at this season, even if you don't take them out of the case, so I had to get there and back in the course of the morning."

"You couldn't have used anything else?"

Jaskier contemplated the gummy surface of the table, his long fingers picking at the grain of the badly-finished wood. "It's partially a matter of politics, my friend. Devious minds are calculating advantages and allegiances and alliances in this little performative world. My colleagues here are my competitors at this point in time, even if it's not part of the literal competition, and nobody else has an instrument that would reflect well on me, let alone sound good."

"That one did."

Jaskier did a double-take, looking up from the mess of stains on the table. He laid a hand dramatically over his heart and gaped. "Did you just pay your dearest, closest, most loyal friend your very first compliment?"

Geralt backtracked. "No, it was for the Borsody lute."

"Too late! No takebacks!" Jaskier had actually jumped out of his chair, pointing at Geralt. It was a wonder he didn't hit his head on the ceiling. "You said I sounded good!"

He had reflected well on himself at the concert, too, Geralt considered. The image of Jaskier, gleaming gold and chestnut, straight-backed and entrancingly still at the center of a crowd of thousands, would stay with him. "That's not what I said."

"Yes, it is, and I'll remember it fondly for the rest of my life. I'll enshrine it in an allegorical ballad, just you wait," Jaskier said, beaming.

Geralt could feel his own lips pulling into a moderate smirk. "So why couldn't you use your lute?"

Jaskier's face fell, and he sat heavily back down. "It's broken," he said, as though he were announcing a death in the family.

"Can't you get it fixed?" Surely there was some instrument-making expert in Oxenfurt.

Jaskier stared. "It's magic, Geralt. It's been magically sabotaged. There are great luthiers here, but they're not equipped for this. You're the one who knows the world's most powerful and capricious sorceresses."

"It's magic?" Neither Geralt's senses nor his medallion had ever responded to the presence of the lute Jaskier had been using all this time on the road together.

"It must be. Loath as I am to admit it, even the best and most careful performer in the world can't make a lute that size sound like _that_ on the road for _so_ much of the year, for _so_ long." Jaskier stood back up and got himself another cup, this one from the keg.

"But I didn't..." Geralt trailed off. "It can't be."

Jaskier took a careful sip of whatever he'd got from the keg, and looked skeptically at Geralt. "That elven-king, Filavandrel--well, actually, I suppose it was Toruviel who gave me this lute as an apology for breaking mine, a couple decades ago, at the end of our first adventure together, in a cave at the end of the world." He took a bigger swig, less cautious. "I've been crisscrossing the continent with you, on _foot_ most of the time, may I add--which I must both thank and berate you for, by the way, because there are times when an ability to walk five miles in court shoes is the difference between getting a gig and getting blacklisted, but also _why won't you ever let me ride_ , you merciless pile of social missteps, I know it's not because Roach bites like you're always saying, she--anyway, how long do you think a normal lute usually lasts?" He took an outright confident sip.

Geralt considered. Lutes were made of wood, and there was still-functional wooden furniture at Kaer Morhen that had been there when he was in training. "A hundred years?" he guessed.

Jaskier spluttered nearly exactly like a drowner with its throat slit. Geralt was almost sure he was doing it on purpose. "A _hundred_ \-- what--you, you think--trudging through swamps and snowbanks and sodden downpours--"

Geralt watched him wallow theatrically in his outrage. "Aren't the older instruments nicer?"

Jaskier was almost as indignant as Geralt had ever seen him. "Not lutes! Viols, sure! They're two coins wide at the seams! They hardly ever crack spontaneously! They developed a thing with the varnish in Ofieri workshops, you can't varnish a lute, it's a whole different--never mind, you don't care, just--you saw the elf give my lute to me with your very own eyes and you didn't think it might be special?"

"I had other things to think about."

"When we met in Posada--"

"When you interrupted my drink and stalked me out of town?"

"--I was using a seven-course student tenor lute, also known as a heinous, clunky piece of luthier's trash." Jaskier's gestures were nearly spilling his cup.

Geralt snatched the endangered drink out of Jaskier's hand. He murmured into the cup, recklessly sipping whatever alcoholic nonsense had come from the keg. "You're a heinous, clunky piece of luthier's trash."

"It cost me four crowns and a sloppy kiss, which was convenient because that was all I ever had on me in those days, and it had frets glued onto the fingerboard all the way down the neck, built for someone who didn't even know how to tie or adjust lute frets, because they _really_ couldn't play. It was a source of mild shame for me--"

"You can feel shame?"

"--That people might think my musicianship only merited that horrible bucket. And then you appeared like a silver-crowned king of adventure in that dank, dingy dungeon of a tavern--"

"Ugh."

"And the _very first_ job we went on together--"

"That you followed me on despite being punched in the gut as discouragement."

"--Was to the end of the world where the elven king had fled, and you'll never know the kind of pain it caused me that his attack dog _broke my lute_ \--"

"I thought it was a horrible bucket."

"--Which despite being a horrible bucket was all I had to make myself heard, notwithstanding my radiantly resonant and highly trained voice--"

"Why would you even need a lute? Nobody can hear it when you're this loud."

"The point remains," Jaskier said severely, scooping Geralt's first cup off the table and pouring another serving from the keg, "That the lute Toruviel gave me was a ludicrous advantage in my particular professional situation, and that advantage is gone. I'm not exactly helpless without it, but it sure did make my life easier. And yours, too, little did you apparently know. I'll need some more heinous pieces of luthiers' trash for our next adventure if you can't help me fix it, because I can't take a regular lute on the kind of journeys we make. The things don't handle humidity changes, let alone downpours, with impunity. In fact, they're nearly useless on the road."

Geralt set his--Jaskier's cup down. "You mean if it hadn't been magic, just a summer storm on a day of walking with me would probably be enough to break it?"

"Well, yes. If I had it out of the case. I am careful, you know."

"I wouldn't say I know that."

"Now you do. If I hadn't had a supernaturally durable instrument I would of course have come with you anyway, but it would have been very annoying for you."

"Oh, no. Imagine that."

"I would have had to keep it in bed with me--for humidity reasons, don't look at me like that--every night, and wrapped it in a cloth every time I put it away. I would have fussed much more about the rain or the mist or any water, really, or if the weather got too dry I'd have to put a damp cloth in the case with it. I would've had to replace the strings much more often, and the frets too, and whenever we stopped in a performance-worthy venue I'd be tuning for at least half an hour before I played anything--"

Jaskier's litany faded a little into familiar background noise as Geralt took stock of himself. Geralt was well accustomed to maintaining calm in the face of Jaskier's panic, but that was in his own professional witcher's world, his own familiar work. But Jaskier's lute, which was secretly very special, was broken. This was Jaskier's world and his own specialist work, and there was no carefully garnered monster lore for Geralt to respond with that would give him a set of relevant preparations to make so that he'd have a better chance of succeeding. He couldn't just deduce it was a rotfiend, put necrophage oil on his sword, and set out to track it--

Or, perhaps, he could. Something monstrous, and probably supernatural, had happened to an apparently covertly magical lute. Presumably there were intended consequences to Jaskier's professional life, and perhaps personal ones too. If he stuck close to Jaskier through this whole festival, to observe and maybe forestall these consequences, it might not be too far off what he could do on a normal job. He wasn't fending off angry lovers, or angry lovers' lovers, here, but he had considerable experience defending Jaskier from consequences.

"So what happened to it?" Geralt interrupted.

Jaskier winced. "It just--came apart," he said, suddenly quiet. His open face was much more honestly distressed than he had ever looked while complaining of a broken heart or an aching heel. "The neck off the body, the fingerboard off the neck, the soundboard, all the pieces of the bowl, the ribs, the bridge." He swallowed. "It's like the glue suddenly disappeared, all at once."

"Lutes are glued together?" Geralt had the impression they were jointed and dovetailed together like the kind of wooden puzzle carpenters made for fun, and to amuse nobles with nothing better to do than open difficult boxes.

"Yes, they're glued. Rabbit-skin, deerhide, or fish glue, generally." Jaskier looked glumly into his empty cup. "Not the kind of substance that usually disappears entirely and in unison from every single location on an instrument." He sighed, and his breath hitched a little. His heartbeat was a bit fast, too. "I did take the pieces to a luthier, and she said the shell and the ribs were Brokilon yew, and it was smooth and clean as if no glue had ever touched them. And they won't hold any of the glues she had in her workshop."

Geralt gave him a sharp look. "If someone killed a Brokilon dryad to make that lute, no one I know is going to fix it," he said.

"Vicious as she was when she had us captive, I really don't think Toruviel would've," Jaskier pondered, and put his cup regretfully back on the bar. "Or anyone the elves might've taken a lute from, if she didn't make it herself. They're not a dryad-killing lot. Their faction is basically the definition of nonhuman solidarity."

Geralt relaxed a little. "That's true," he admitted. "They're the ones who would know what to do with the pieces, too, though. Have you asked any elves?"

Jaskier scowled. "I'm a little busy at the moment, and I was hoping to have it back together before the Chief Singing. Hence, the favor."

"I'll need to know a little more before I go sniffing the city for magical glue disappearers," Geralt admonished.

"I know, I know. I _should_ know how you work. I'll tell you the whole story this evening." He scooted the lute case back out from under the table and hugged it to himself. "I just wanted to greet you properly and get a drink before the kids' first round of screeching."

"That does sound unpleasant. You're sure you can't be drunk?"

Jaskier recovered a little of his composure, and smirked a knowing smirk. "I'm meant to play ensemble for what feels like half the Academy singers--the Gamut's an Oxenfurt competition, too, not just a professional one--but luckily they have only twenty-eight tunes to choose from, and the undergrads are always in some kind of emotional phase, and the fashion for the tunes comes in waves, so it's usually more like everyone does one of five songs. Most of the time the challenge for the judges is to find something new to say about how each one performs the same thing. It's not difficult to play, except trying to keep it fresh on repetition, but I don't want to be smashed. That's not fair to them." Jaskier rose, slung the case over his shoulder, and set both cups down behind the bar, empty.

Geralt nodded. "See you when you're done, I suppose. Where should I meet you?"

Jaskier winced. "Junior faculty are in student housing for the duration, while illustrious guests, competitors or spectators, occupy the faculty housing. I'm lucky to still be in town at all, to be sure. Corbel House is on the corner of the square facing the South Bridge. I should be done by sunset, if none of these children have a competition crisis, though I admit it's not unlikely. If I'm late, I'll sneak you into the Hanged Hare and get you a mug of the best in town. South Bridge square, Corbel House, on the corner. Meet me in the main arch at the porter's gate. Can't miss it." Jaskier tossed the last over his shoulder as he flitted out the undersized tavern door into the still-blinding brightness of the outdoors.

"All right." Geralt stood, at something of a loss.

What to do, loose in Oxenfurt before he had enough information to do the job he'd come here for?

Well, he supposed it _was_ the Bards' Gamut.

~

It had been helpful of Le Papillon, Toussaintois herald of the tourney field and Gamut schedule announcer, to declaim every single act the day held in store on the stage where Jaskier's performance had opened the festival. One of the things he'd pompously listed was an exhibition of expert music Arguments of some sort, which sounded like more fun than whatever Jaskier was playing for at the moment. The open square was more comfortable to stand in a crowd than the constantly-buffeting streets or the tumultuous taverns, Jaskier's tiny, silent professor-bar haven notwithstanding. The smell of grilled meat and dumplings was enticing and from the same direction, so Geralt retraced his steps past the well, to the first stage, acquiring some entertainingly large and outrageously expensive pork buns on the way.

Indeed an argument seemed to be in progress, raucous and strident, but it was between two bards, and it was also music.

A jovial-looking man in an elegant deep-green doublet was playing a Koviri fiddle and singing across the stage, and the words were just a series of mild but thoroughly amusing insults. They rhymed, but the man seemed to be making them up on the spot, just as he was making up the tune he sang on top of the pattern he was playing.

Some signal occured that Geralt couldn't perceive, and it was the other side's turn: a sweet-looking girl in orange doublet and hose, playing an intricately-inlaid lute much fancier than Jaskier's, flipped the feather on her fluffy hat out of her eyes and bellowed back at the man with rhymes twice as fast and twice as funny. The tune she sang her tirade to was related to the one he'd been using, but it somehow ran around it, turned it back on itself and made it seem stupid.

Her phrase ended decisively and it was the man's turn again. He apparently had to collect his thoughts a little before responding to her skilled statement, because he fiddled a complicated flourish without singing anything, clearly playing for time. The crowd hooted; apparently this kind of wordless delay was acceptable, but only barely. The man recovered, and sang. He tossed of a few pairs of rhyming lines about how gold was worth more than salt and took longer to shape, but the crowd nearly drowned him out, so this was clearly not as fitting a rebuttal as he'd hoped.

The woman picked up the thread where he'd dropped it, and folded both the musical phrase and the Argument into a neat, fine shape: gold was soft to the goldsmith's hammer even cold, but she was warm enough to pour some out for him despite the salt he clearly preferred. Her lines had a slightly more complicated rhyme scheme this time, and they seemed to fit a pattern the crowd could read, because when she played the conclusive line of the phrase after finishing her turn singing, the whole square burst into the kind of shrieking victorious cheers Geralt had only previously heard from the gamblers betting on a winning tourney knight or gladiator. The woman had clearly won.

She swept her capacious orange hat off and saluted the stamping, jumping, yelling audience with it, and then her opponent. He bowed as well and walked to her, fiddle in hand, and, to Geralt's surprise, gave her a warm and affectionate hug. It was a good-natured argument, then. Maybe all musical ones were. He'd have to ask Jaskier.

The victor bowed again, gestured graciously in acknowledgement of her opponent, and sauntered down the stairs at the side of the stage. Geralt almost wanted to follow her and ask her about the Argument, but she was mobbed immediately by clearly adoring admirers in a way that even Jaskier hadn't been, so Geralt fixed her image in his memory and made a note to himself to ask Jaskier about her, since he'd only seen the end of the performance and hadn't caught the names that Le Papillon had announced earlier.

A gaggle of petrified teenagers with drums was now filing onto the stage, and, as Geralt's headache had returned, he wasn't really in the mood to hear whatever they were going to do from up close. He resolved to explore the rest of the festival while the sun was still up, keeping his senses open for anything suspicious that might have to do with Jaskier's lute problem.

It was hard to keep track of people acting suspicious at a festival this size. Even for him.

There was so much going on everywhere. A different tune floated from the door of every sweet-ale-scented tavern and roast-redolent boarding-house. Art studios and craft guildhalls rang with exhibitions, and the street was roiling not only with spectators and barkers, but even with performers of various troupes, musical and dramatic. Little islands of music hung in the river of hurrying, dawdling, and occasionally stockstill audience. The better street performers, or maybe the more famous ones, drew bigger rings of people who stopped to stand and watch, and some of them required a significant amount of space in the road. A group of impressively proficient tumblers looked familiar to Geralt somehow, but he didn't stop to watch them, as he was on the other side of the road and turning against the flow of traffic, while not physically difficult for a witcher, would be inconvenient or even harmful to the people immediately surrounding him.

It still was half an hour before sunset when he reached the South Bridge, but this end of the town was a little quieter, and Geralt was content to wait. The road wasn't stuffed six abreast both directions with people here, and the crossing over the Pontar canal to the even calmer, lower city was a relief. The biggest noise came from the flat roof decks of the boarding-houses and dormitories, where drunken students and tourists sang in a decidedly noncompetitive category. It was still rowdy, but at a remove.

Geralt noted that Corbel House, on the corner of the square facing the bridge just as Jaskier had said, was even conveniently labeled with a stone plaque. He settled onto the low garden wall across the square from it, and prepared to meditate lightly until sunset.

It wasn't a long wait. Jaskier didn't exactly sneak up on him, but he didn't make as much noise as usual as he walked tiredly past Geralt to the porter's gate. "I don't live here, most of the time, you know," he greeted Geralt a little defensively. "They haven't exactly turned the dons out of their beds, but part-time professors get to pile five to a two-bed suite while the competing students bunk out on pallets on the more respectable tavern floors." The porter airily verified Jaskier's admittance to the courtyard, and nodded to Geralt on his wave. "The non-competing students get kicked all the way out to a spooky old estate on the Velen side of the Pontar." 

Geralt was familiar with several spooky Velen estates, and did not relish the thought of commuting from any of them to Oxenfurt for the Gamut.

Jaskier led Geralt through the gate and turned immediately under a set of sandy stone stairs into an inconveniently small door. "So don't complain. It's not as if we haven't shared much worse beds on the Path."

"I'm not usually the one who complains about the accommodations," Geralt protested as he hunched through the little door behind Jaskier.

"I imagine you're not," said someone else, and Geralt came face to face with Hildegarda, the taller and rounder of Jaskier's colleagues that he'd met after the concert.

Jaskier hadn't been kidding. It was a two-bed suite, and the beds weren't especially big. Jaskier was carefully pushing his lute case as far under one of the beds as it would go. The ceiling sloped where Geralt stood under the stairs, and opened out a little past Hildegarda into a more comfortable, but still fairly-cramped space. There was a table between the beds, and a man in an elegant green doublet sat with his feet propped up on it, only to let them fall as he caught sight of Geralt on the other side of Hildegarda.

"Oh! It's you!" the man said, nearly tipping his chair over.

"Yes, darling, it's the world-famous White Wolf," Hildegarda told him, a smile in her voice, and backed up out of the doorway and sat down on the bed Jaskier wasn't adjusting, to give Geralt some room.

"Pleased to meet you?" Geralt tried, and then recognized the man from the musical Argument.

"Of course, the pleasure is most deeply and thoroughly mine," the man said, standing to shake Geralt's hand. "I'm Siegmund, Hildegarda's husband."

Geralt nodded. "I saw the end of the Argument this afternoon. You were very good. Do you teach here?"

Jaskier finished fussing over the Borsody lute and sat, smiling, on the bed he'd hid it under. "He does teach here," he said, highly amused.

"Siegmund's the don of the Bows, otherwise known as Vielle, Rebec, and Lira studies, and though the council for lodgings has let the dons keep their rooms for the Gamut, he's graciously slumming it here with us on my behalf," Hildegarda said indulgently. "He's a demon with a bow and a string, but the Argument is never fair when Callonetta's playing."

"Is that her name? The woman who won?" Geralt had been very impressed with her.

"Her stage name. Her name's Priscilla," Jaskier sighed from his bed. "She's always going to win."

Geralt glanced at Hildegarda, and she nodded. "It's true. Nobody on the continent has a quicker wit or a finer ear for melody."

Geralt looked expectantly at Jaskier. "Why haven't I heard of her? Does she just stay here?"

Jaskier shook his head. "She gives concerts in kingdoms far and wide, and every noble wants to be her patron. She could have her pick of the courts, but she's on the road as much as we are, and though it's not surprising we haven't crossed paths, I wouldn't be surprised if we did, someday."

Siegmund snorted. "I'd far rather stay here and have all the latest repertoire brought to me, but if someone must wander and represent the profession, I'm glad it's Callonetta."

Geralt hummed. "I don't know much about it, but I liked her performance this afternoon very much," he admitted.

"Oh, to have seen her on the Gamut stage with a tenso or a devinalh," Jaskier murmured, less dramatically than Geralt was accustomed to hearing from him on the subject of beautiful women.

Hildegarda caught his eye again. "Just as well he was busy backing up the children. Our lad here is as gone on Priscilla as he ever has been on anyone, but if you of all people don't know of her..." She clicked her tongue. "I'd say he respects her so deeply he can't even flatter her in song."

That was unusual. Well, Geralt respected her, too. "I'd like to hear her again if I get the chance during the Gamut. But I think Jaskier and I have some work to do this evening."

Jaskier scrubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, then stood up. "Yes, indeed! And I've promised you a mug of the best in town! I forgot I don't have the change of doublet here that I do in my rooms on the Music hall, so I can't get you into the Hare this evening, but we'll find a way."

Hildegarda looked upon Jaskier with visible pity. "Julian, you just spent three hours with--let me guess--five of the Twenty-Eight Competitors' Songs repeating in your fingers, and you're not going to let that lute out of your sight until it's back at the Borsody House. You're going to worry constantly about it if you take it to a tavern. Sit down, budge over, and let Geralt sit with you, and I'll break into my stash to celebrate you playing your first Gamut opener."

"You have a stash?" Jaskier was scandalized. "You, the darling of the dean, the baroness of the brass, the mild-mannered majesty of the instrumental faculty?"

"She teaches the horn," Siegmund stage-whispered to Geralt.

"I heard," Geralt whispered back.

"Who makes the Hare's best beer?" Hildegarda looked sternly at Jaskier.

"The Sisters of Melitele in the Velen abbey, if I recall correctly," Jaskier frowned.

"You do recall correctly," Hildegarda allowed. "And who actually has a sister who left for the abbey in our youth?" Hildegarda inquired sweetly.

"You do. You do?" Jaskier's rear hit the bed and bumped its narrow frame against the wall. "You have an in with the abbey brewsters? And you never told me?"

"The need was never so great. Look at your muse, standing here after day one of the Gamut, perishing for a drink, and him promised the best in town."

Jaskier, Hildegarda, and Siegmund all regarded Geralt, looming in the door-hollow under the stairs.

"Yes," Jaskier determined. "The need is great, now. So, so great."

Hildegarda clucked. "I told them to drop it at the Hall this afternoon. Tess is bringing a keg for me when today's rounds of junior longform poetry are done. She should be back any moment now."

Jaskier wiggled backward onto the bed and then flopped lengthwise on it. His doublet gapped at the neck. "Come sit, Geralt, we're not going out again. Or," and he sat up in a panic, "Where's Roach?"

"Left her at the stables on the outskirts with enough to pay for a week's board," Geralt assured him, and added, "I liked the look of the groom they had feeding her. I doubted she'd have a very good time in town with all this... going on."

Jaskier beckoned again, more insistently. "Yes, there's a lot going on, so come here, let me get those nasty spiky pauldrons off you and smooth those traveling lumps out of your shoulders--"

"Didn't you ride to Novigrad and back this morning?" Geralt left the shelter of the overhanging stairs and was drawn Jaskierward.

"Yes, but I didn't also race the ice-melt across the land from a faraway mountain fortress for the last week, so I'd bet you an assistant professor's meager salary that you need a rub more than I do," Jaskier retorted, and patted the bed next to him.

Geralt went. It was a good excuse. His shoulders were fine, but they'd be better than fine if he let Jaskier peel him out of his armor and push him around a little. "As long as your hands aren't tired from playing."

Jaskier sniffed, disdaining the very idea, and unbuckled the pauldrons and gorget so that he could set to, mauling Geralt's trapezius.

"I wouldn't take any bet against you needing a massage, and you should keep your meager salary. But if we're betting, I'm up for cards. I haven't tried my secondary deck out against an opponent," Geralt ventured, considering the tired but still festive mood of the room.

Siegmund blew out his cheeks and shook his head. "If you play gwent against Hildegarda, don't bet high," he advised. "Julian can tell you. She's a menace. Be careful," he insisted at Geralt's patient expression.

"The man's a witcher, dear, he knows about risk assessment," Hildegarda said. "And I bet he's won a few tournaments in his day. He has the look," she assessed, twirling a lock of her light hair around her finger. "Let your man knock a few stones out of your, ah, very well-developed and surely high-tension musculature, and we'll try a couple rounds for beers. Tess is bringing the best, so you absolutely must have some before Julian drags you into his sorry business," she wheedled.

He wasn't about to refuse. "I do like a round of gwent, and Jaskier is apparently about to owe me a favor," he measured. "I'm in."

Siegmund hadn't been exaggerating. Hildegarda set out a loaf of sweet bread and a huge cheese on the little table, across from Geralt's perch on the bed, in a deceptively motherly way, and indicated it was dinner for anyone in the room who needed some. But then she swept her deck out with the practiced flick of a professional sharp. Geralt's secondary deck was easily retrieved from its place in his pack, and though his deal wasn't as flashy, he thought his hand might be better.

They picked absentmindedly at the bread and cheese, as they played, though it was of a much better quality than Geralt usually got from an innkeeper. Jaskier shucked his fancy doublet and consumed at least half the cheese by himself. Hildegarda relaxed as well, untying the points of her sleeves and shedding them. Jaskier's ministrations to Geralt's shoulders (and his incessant over-the-shoulder card advice, which was usually less than entirely helpful) paused as a commotion erupted in the doorway.

"Is anybody going to help me with all this? I know you said one keg, but your sister's very persuasive." Tess, still respendent in the pink-and-orange kirtle she'd worn at the afternoon performance, kicked the door out of the way of the keg she rolled before her.

Siegmund leapt up and hastened to assist. "We're going to be the most popular suite on the hall," he said, laughing, as he helped Tess roll two more kegs through the door. "Where will we even fit them?"

Geralt folded his legs under his chair and gestured under the table. "I don't think they'll go under either of the beds," he said, "but the table's tall enough."

Tess stood the last one on its end, picked up the loaf, tore a chunk from it with her teeth, and appraised the game on the table. "What are we betting on?" she inquired.

Hildegarda clucked disapprovingly. "I thought you were bringing bottles, Tess. We'd settled on first taste."

Tess nodded. "Ah, start him off slow. No high stakes. Good idea." She winked at Geralt.

Jaskier huffed loftily and resumed working at a recalcitrant tendon at the base of Geralt's neck. "I hope you mean the beer, Tereska," he said repressively, and it was a funny tone to hear from him. "I was fully ready to sneak him into the Hare for a mug, and then make him figure out what in the name of Melitele has happened to my darling lute." He sniffed. "None of my plans for the evening included the sophisticated delights of the Rosebud, but that's where we'll end up if you let her win," he added in Geralt's ear.

Geralt looked at the cards, and then at Hildegarda. "I'm willing to forfeit if you'll let me have the second beer," he said humbly, not sure how many layers of metaphor he was plumbing. "I like the game, but I think I may already be in too deep. I haven't been to the Rosebud for years, and the last time was for a job."

Hildegarda, Tess, and Siegmund all looked skeptically at him, and he could feel Jaskier smiling from behind him.

"Not that kind of job," he assured them. "I don't have the looks to work at the Rosebud, anyway," he mused.

Jaskier snorted. "Don't sell yourself short, my friend."

Hildegarda played a round-ending Scorch. "Well, the urbane entertainments of the Rosebud are not on the table tonight, either paying or working," she grinned, "so scoop up your hand and get ready for the second taste of the beer."

Geralt gathered his cards from the table and nodded to her. "Thanks for a good game, and a good forfeit," he said.

Jaskier smacked his trapezius a couple times to get Geralt's slow blood flowing into it, and said, "I've half a mind to make you tap the keg yourself, but we've just established you don't get first taste."

"Let Siegmund do it," Hildegarda commanded. "He gets such a kick out of it."

"What, should I deny it?" Siegmund was already hefting a keg onto the table and setting the tap to the bunghole. "First taste for you, my love," he said, filling a mug and handing it to Hildegarda. "Second should by rights go to the gracious purveyor of such bounty, Tess, but we've promised it to Geralt," he apologized.

"I'm not exactly here for a party, but--" Geralt took the mug Siegmund held insistently out to him. "Thanks," he said, and tried it. It was, indeed, much better than the chemistry lecturer's attempts. It was, in fact, very good. He raised his eyebrows.

"Good to see you again," Tess toasted him with her third-poured mug. "I hope you like it; it was pretty heavy to bring from the docks," she teased.

"Let me help, next time," Geralt countered. "I'm pretty good for carrying heavy stuff."

Tess eyed him up and down, rather unsubtly. "I'll keep that in mind."

"All right, all right," Jaskier scolded, as though he had even the slightest room to speak, took his own drink, and pulled Geralt further onto the undersized bed. "We're all enjoying the beer, but I do want to know what you think of this," he said, and leaned over to draw a structured but not rigid leather bag out from under the bed and set it in Geralt's lap.

Geralt unbuckled the closure and opened the neck. It was full of weird sticks and thin plates, and his medallion shivered as he reached in. They felt bad. Almost soapy to the touch, but with a burn to the soap like under-greased lye. He gently withdrew a biggish one from the bag and held it up to his eyes. "Don't like that," he said without thinking.

"Nor do I, my friend. Nor do I," muttered Jaskier sadly.

Tess sucked air in through her teeth looking at it. "I know you told me it was just pieces, Julian, but I hadn't imagined it like that," she said sympathetically. "Are any of them actually broken, though?"

Geralt ignored the irritated hum of his medallion and the uncomfortable slippery feeling of the contents of the bag and set them out on the bedspread, one by one. They all seemed to be smooth and intentionally shaped, no jagged or torn edges.

"No, at least there's that," Jaskier said, almost literally grasping at straws. Some of the pieces were thin enough to weave into a basket. He picked them up with the delicate care he always used on his instrument. "I took them to Rachla and she tried all kinds of glue to put them back together, and absolutely nothing worked."

"It wouldn't, on Brokilon yew," Geralt murmured, turning a piece over carefully to look at the inside of the curve.

"She said the same thing," Jaskier sighed. "I don't suppose your expertise gives you an idea of what kind of glue would hold on such a particular wood?"

"Not off the top of my head. All my glue expertise is for armor," Geralt replied. "This isn't all yew, though," he said.

"No, just the ribs, the shell, and the caps. The neck is maple, the soundboard is spruce, and the fretboard and pegbox are both cherry. The glue wouldn't stay on any of it. She couldn't tell if it was all from Brokilon or not, just the yew."

"I can't either, with this curse tingling all over it," Geralt said, distracted.

Jaskier goggled, reflexively pulling the neck of his chemise closed. "Curse?"

Siegmund and Hildegarda looked over from their bed, and Tess paused in her swig. "Is it dangerous?" she asked.

"You couldn't have mentioned this immediately?" Jaskier sniped. "Is it going to affect my playing?"

"It's just a kind of banishment, I think," Geralt said, looking closely at the biggest piece, the flat soundboard. It felt better. The decorative veneer hadn't come off it. "For the glue."

"Someone banished the glue out of my lute?" Jaskier's tone was annoyed, but the confusion took the edge out of it. "Why would they do that?"

"Well, you said it was sabotage," Geralt prompted him. "Who've you upset lately?"

Tess chuckled. "Well, he doesn't sleep with students, and you'd think that'd narrow things down, but really, it causes its own kind of upset," she began.

"I'm inclined to think it might be more of a professional enmity than a personal one, considering the timing" Jaskier hedged, scratching his chest through the gaping neck of his chemise, "But I suppose one can't rule out a crime of passion."

Geralt put the soundboard down and shook his fingers out. "Whose spouse, heir, or parent have you slept with recently that you shouldn't have?"

Hildegarda spoke up from the other bed. "You can rule us out," she tittered, gesturing to Siegmund. "Both of us were there with him, and nobody was angry about it. At all," she elaborated.

"Didn't really need to know that," Geralt blinked, "but okay."

"Let's see," Jaskier counted silently on his fingers. "I just--I can't really think of anyone I've left on bad terms in Oxenfurt," he muttered, baffled. "No one has whispered even a hint of discontent."

"Alyona's been pining after you since she came here three years ago. She could be jealous," Siegmund pointed out.

"Alyona?" Jaskier was outraged. "She's a gem, a sweet songbird, the gentle wren of my academic colleagues. Why would she ask me to conduct the undergrads for the Concours, if she were jealous, and then sabotage my professional advantage?"

"To keep you here, without something to play during the times you venture on the road?" Siegmund shrugged. "It doesn't make too much sense, but plans born of jealousy often don't."

"I don't believe it," Jaskier said staunchly. "We work together so often. She's not that good an actor, if nothing else. And she's the least magically-inclined person in Oxenfurt--she won't even go to an herbalist for a cough. Something about a hex in her childhood. She avoids even hedgewitches." Jaskier contemplated his fingernails. "Anyway, if we suspected everyone who pined after me a little, we'd have to put half the Academy on the list," he said, without a hint of either irony or self-consciousness. He rummaged in his bag for a file and shortened the nail on his index finger. "Hazards of being well-known, displaying talent, and sitting in a position of slight authority, while also maintaining a schedule of frequent absences."

Geralt supposed that formula made sense, though he didn't think that was all there was to Jaskier's charm.

"What about that dyer boy you were seeing out by the docks a few months ago?" Hildegarda suggested. "I thought that didn't end as well as you wished it had?"

Jaskier laughed. "He was spectacular with his hands, to be sure, but he was more interested in my connections than my music, my personal attributes, _or_ my personality. You may not know this about me," he whispered to the room at large as he put the file back in his bag, "but I'm just the teensiest bit vain. Just a tad. A smidgen." 

Tess gasped histrionically, then choked on her beer. "No," she coughed.

Jaskier nodded. "It's always nice to be appreciated for _something_ , but I prefer that it not be entirely mercenary. It wasn't a tragedy we drifted apart, though I wouldn't kick him out of bed to this day." He scratched his chin contemplatively. "I suppose he could harbor some resentments?" He sounded uncertain.

Siegmund snapped his fingers. "The weaver! You never had time for her, and the affair fell apart in weeks!"

Jaskier cleared his throat. "Yara's a spinster, not a weaver, which is why _she_ never had time for _me_. She's extraordinarily dedicated to her craft and she was trying to save up for a wheel, so she spent every waking moment with her hands on her long, smooth, elegant drop spindle. I was the one feeling neglected."

"Oho," Tess chortled, "a taste of your own medicine!"

"Didn't you have an archnemesis or something?" Geralt asked, uncomfortable. "You wished him dead first thing, when you thought you had the djinn. Is that guy competing?"

Jaskier bristled. "Yes, but we make a point of avoiding each other. He doesn't live here. He's only in town for the Gamut, and I haven't seen him in person for about ten years. If he's done this, I'll have no qualms about killing him without the benefit of a djinn."

"I'd guess that Valdo Marx knows nothing about curses," Hildegarda offered. "He's even further up the backside of musical academia than I am, and he has no room in his brain for the complexities of even simple magic."

"You know him?" Geralt asked.

"We've met, and I've played some of his self-important ensemble nonsense," she explained. "He only writes--I'm sorry, _composes_ , for what he calls real musicians." She gestured loftily with her mug. "You know, professionals."

"He accused me of pandering to the taste of the masses," Jaskier said haughtily. "I'd almost be prepared to concede that, because I write for myself _and_ everyone else, instead of just for myself, but he also called me a talentless wastrel."

"Whereas you are a wastrel of supreme and undeniable talent," Siegmund assured him. "But I've seen better people call you worse things in bars," he mused, "and you never took it so hard."

"Hurts the worst coming from those you're closest to," Tess hypothesized.

"Yes, fine, we used to be close, but that nadir of Cidarian ignobility is a tasteless waste of musical space, and I have better things to do than consider his opinions." Jaskier chugged the rest of his beer. He was clearly shutting himself up, since it was very good beer. Not the kind he'd usually chug.

"Aren't you from Cidaria too, anyway?" Siegmund prodded, ignoring the end Jaskier was trying to make to the subject.

Jaskier nearly choked. "I'm from Lettenhove, thank you very much."

Tess whistled. "Which used to be in Kerack, but got assimilated. Acrimony must abound."

Hildegarda shushed her husband. "You're the greatest possible contrast, Julian. The acme of Redanian nobility."

"I'm a very good bard who wanders the Northern Kingdoms and teaches in the winters, but I'm better than Valdo Marx, and if that made him angry enough to curse my lute for the Gamut, I hope I have the support of my friends in my retribution," Jaskier intoned grandiosely from where he'd fallen over onto the bed behind Geralt.

Geralt put the pieces of the cursed lute gently back in the bag. "You should talk to him," he said.

"I absolutely will not," Jaskier retorted. "As well ask me to portal up to wherever Yennefer's teaching your darling blonde whirlwind to control chaos, stomp them both on the toes, and run all the way back. I wouldn't even know how to go about beginning to speak to Valdo Marx, the thought appeals less than almost anything else I can imagine, and my capabilities are varied and manifold but they do not include civility to the Troubadour of Cidaris."

"Don't sell yourself short," Geralt said. "If your life, or, say, your lute, depended on it, I think you could do it." He leaned over Jaskier to put the bag of lute pieces back under the bed with the borrowed lute. Jaskier was still shuddering with disgust.

Tess tilted her head. "Purely out of professional curiosity, I'd like to see that. It'd be some strong rhetoric required to reconcile those two. Even to the point of civil speech."

"You have poetry judging all day tomorrow, Tess. Don't think I'll do it for your entertainment," Jaskier sulked, poking Geralt as he righted himself.

"That's true, but sometimes these things are even more entertaining secondhand, and I get the impression Geralt has a lot of great secondhand entertainments to relate in your absence," Tess winked.

"Stop it. Hildegarda, she's stealing my muse," Jaskier whined, and pulled Geralt by the ribcage.

"Serves you right for bringing him to the Academy. He's famous, Julian, and it's your fault." Hildegarda settled pitilessly into the curve of her husband's shoulder.

Tess set her mug down, yawned, and stretched. Her vertebrae crackled and her right shoulder gave a particulaly resonant snap. "I'll stop stealing him if you share your side. I know you're both bigger than the brass-and-bow lovebirds over there, but if you didn't want everyone to know he's a cuddler you shouldn't have written the Ballad of the Bloodhound's Ease."

Geralt stood, sliding out of Jaskier's grip. "I'll take the floor," he started.

"Shut up," said Jaskier and Tess in unison.

"It's not like I haven't slept right on top of you before," Jaskier said, catching Tess's contagious yawn.

"That was on a freezing mountain trail." Geralt frowned.

"The first time, maybe," Jaskier said, grabbing Geralt's hand and yanking it mercilessly. "Tess won't get you, I promise. I'll protect you."

"Fine." Geralt let himself be pulled back onto the bed, and resigned himself to a night of overheated restlessness at best, and unsubtle groping at worst.

"Sleep tight, friends. Gamut's on." Jaskier was indeed pulling tight against him as Tess settled confidently into Geralt's other side, but didn't make any moves untoward for a traveller's bedfellow.

He felt Jaskier's breaths stilling into the occasional hitch of deep sleep, but he didn't even notice himself slip under the same way, his headache completely gone.

~

Jaskier's professional obligations were lighter the second day of the Gamut, but that didn't mean he alotted any time for conversation with, or even ascertaining the location of, his rival.

"If we're going to see the end of the Poesy Trial we have to get in at the beginning, or there won't be a seat left, and you can't do standing room at the Poesy Trial," he said, hoisting his borrowed lute over his shoulder and chivvying Geralt out of the tiny under-stairs door. The other occupants of the room were long gone to their own engagements, and Geralt was surprised he hadn't wakened again after Tess slid out from under his arm at dawn. At least Jaskier's warm solidity had roused him with its absence when Jaskier had stretched and groaned awake, and risen to dress. But they had both been pretty tired.

"I take it we need to see the end of the Poesy Trial?" Geralt raised an eyebrow. It didn't sound very relevant to Jaskier's lute.

"I've got kids in both the Academic and the Professional categories, and it'll break their hearts if I don't see them compete."

"Ah," Geralt said. "Isn't Poesy kind of a thing of yours, though?" he inquired, scanning the Corbel House quadrangle absently for threats.

"How kind of you to remember," Jaskier responded roguishly. "I'm not competing because I'm on the lists for the Chief Singing," he explained, nodding to the porter in his little gatehouse.

"Ah," Geralt repeated, following him out of the stone arch.

"You can't do both. They both have composed and improvised poetry rounds, but in the Chief Singing there also has to be a tune," Jaskier clarified. "I'm capable of both, so I'm giving it a shot," he said lightly.

Geralt considered the name and concluded the Chief Singing was probably a little higher-stakes than the Poesy Trial. Jaskier rarely admitted to professional intimidation (physical intimidation was another matter, as he never hesitated to call Geralt to his defense), but this was the chief event of the Bards' Gamut. Geralt didn't inquire further about what might be involved.

"But we're going to the Hall of Disputations for the Poesy Trial, right now, because I don't want to have to bribe a squatter or pay a scalper to get in later when the good stuff starts." Jaskier set the pace for their journey back across the South Bridge at a good clip, nearly a lope, faster than he ever wanted to walk at Roach's side.

"Aren't you hungry?" Geralt wasn't used to this businesslike briskness from him.

Jaskier smiled at him, but didn't slacken his pace. "We'll get sticks on the way, and I have venison, cheese and damsons for later."

Sticks, it turned out, were what sold most on the streets of Oxenfurt at festival time. Indefinable meat lumps on sticks, roasted vegetables on sticks, pastry-clad meat pies and fruit dumplings, even cakes, all on sticks. Geralt contented himself with a pair of spiced lamb skewers and a truly gargantuan pretzel. He made to pay for Jaskier's bouquet of steak and squash as well, thinking of the shortfall Jaskier had admitted to, but the vendor waved him away and winked at Jaskier.

"Write me a couplet to call out to Tess and you're fed for the rest of the Gamut," she said, handing him another stick with five slices of zucchini neatly pierced on it.

"Ask and receive," said Jaskier, peremptorily handing his small forest of steaming food to Geralt as he freed both hands to grab his little notebook from his purse and scribble a pair of lines. He stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth, tilted his head at the lines, crossed something out and revised it, and tore the page out of the book to hand it to the smiling vendor. "She's a cad, though. She'll never be yours," he added solicitously, "no matter how beautifully you declaim."

"That's what makes it so romantic," said the girl, taking the page and tucking it into her bosom. "Now get along with you, before you miss the opening of the Hall for the Poesy Trial."

"Yeah," said Geralt, handing him his sticks. "Get along."

Jaskier took his share of skewers with practiced ease and inhaled at least four sticks' worth of the food in ten paces. "Getting," he said distinctly, somehow able to enunciate through the entire meal in his mouth. He didn't get his hands dirty, either. Geralt was impressed.

Less proficiently but still efficiently, Geralt stripped his own delicious skewers in time to hand the empty sticks to an attendant at the enormous and ornately inscribed door Jaskier led him to. The attendant took Jaskier's empty skewers too, with a look of naked awe at Jaskier as he bowed them both in and then turned to dispose of the sticks.

"That boy's a fan," Geralt remarked as they hastened down the long barrel-vaulted hallway that was beginning to fill with, presumably, other spectators of the Poesy Trial.

"It happens sometimes," said Jaskier, unperturbed, and held the door of a truly gargantuan lecture hall for Geralt. "In here, before all the front seats are gone!"

Geralt strode cautiously in, for some reason feeling the absence of the swords he'd left under the bed with Jaskier's lute pieces. His elbow gave a little twinge as he tensed. The architecture was a little adversarial.

Jaskier noted his manner. "It's the Hall of Disputations," he explained. "It's where you defend your work at the end of your studies. If you fail, it's not good."

"Trials," muttered Geralt, shaking his head minutely.

"Nothing quite so dangerous, though definitely at least as dramatic," Jaskier evaluated, and tugged Geralt past an indignant matron to the third row. "Here, we're close enough to hear every nuance, far enough to see the whole performer instead of just the feet." He sat decisively. "Here's good. No need to crane our necks, right in the middle."

"I take it we'll be awhile?" Geralt ventured.

"It's nearly an all-day event," Jaskier confirmed. "Don't get too excited. Pace yourself. The earlier rounds start pretty slow."

Geralt sighed and squashed himself into his seat, trying to present the smallest possible obstacle to the haughty woman shuffling past him to sit on the other side. "I'll try to contain my enthusiasm."

Despite his misgivings, and the grim regard of a man in the back of the room who apparently had a problem with a witcher attending a poetry contest, Geralt wasn't exactly bored by the Poesy Trial. Tess cocked an eyebrow at him from her place with the other judges on the lower front section of the stage during the introductory remarks, which were, of course, unbearably dull, but even the early rounds, full of beginners, were deeply invested in their performances and an invested performer's usually engaging even when the material's less advanced. The improvised categories were even occasionally funny.

There were, of course, a lot of very devoted and nearly unbearable teenaged love poems in the early rounds, but Geralt had to admit some of the metaphors were new to him. Eyes with the mysterious glitter of the haddock in the deep? Sure, why not. In fact, there seemed to be something of a maritime fad going in the competitive academic poetry of the season. He should ask Jaskier about it.

The morning passed in heartfelt and only mildly embarrassing fervor before their eyes, with pauses for applause. Geralt relaxed enough, despite the prickle of that one discontent man's glare from behind him, to join Jaskier in the hooting and cheering that the students in the back of the hall roused for the better performances. The etiquette was not unkind, and Geralt got the impression of a supportive camaraderie in the department, rather than a mean-spirited competion; no one was ever hissed or booed at, even when they made obvious mistakes. Geralt brushed off more and more of the feeling of judgement he'd bristled under on entering the room; his overreaction really was to just the one man who didn't want him here, and the way the hall opposed the judges to the stage. He finally slouched in his chair, and Jaskier offered him a handful of damsons and some venison jerky at the noon break.

"Why is there so much talk about sailing and fish business in the competition, do you think?" Geralt wondered, taking a strip and chewing contemplatively.

Jaskier grinned. "That'd be telling, wouldn't it? A bit of department gossip." He rummaged further in his bag and produced a round of white cheese. "There's a popular sailor lighting a fire under the entire undergraduate poetry world," he relented.

"Ah," said Geralt. "A muse. Way to ride a theme," he judged, and took another bite of jerky.

"Not only a muse," Jaskier batted his eyes in a manner he clearly meant to be mysterious, then ruined the air by wolfing down a truly stupendous mouthful of cheese. "Hush, now, the professional round is starting."

Geralt settled back into his seat. "You must have some students up now, too. Who are we cheering for in this one?"

Jaskier, having settled almost impertinently deep into the seat of his chair, cast a surprised eye, very fondly, up at Geralt. "Little Eye's competing, so. She'd probably love to see a smile from you."

Geralt blinked. Essi Daven, a sweet, no-nonsense kid, like Jaskier's little sister, with her hair always covering one eye: they called her Little Eye. She was a sailor, and always had some tidbit of lore to show off or a pointed question to ask Geralt about monsters. He'd brought her a pearl for her birthday one year, after a contract that required some time diving, because he knew she loved the sea. Her teenage crush on him had been adorable, clouds of verbena perfume wafting off her that wouldn't have been overdone if he hadn't been excessively, witcherly sensitive to strong smells, and she'd worn the pearl on a necklace every time he'd seen her since. He could hardly believe she was competing in a professional round at the Gamut, but it was true she'd already written more than one ballad so moving they'd made Ciri cry.

Yes, it was Little Eye, last in the lineup of ten decent poet-competitors, some of them still undergraduates as she was, but already in the professional category. Geralt smiled. He couldn't tell if she saw him and Jaskier or not, she was so focused and composed, but she stood calmly in the raised middle of the stage and addressed the judges before her with ironclad confidence.

"It is the lark and not the nightingale.  
Thou know'st not what despair rises like gorge,  
Loss etching at my throat with acid pale  
And ember-baked in slag from cruelty's forge.  
The watchman calls a warning from his post,  
A silhouette in sickly, aching light:  
The cold blue seep of day's relentless ghost  
That grieves our cloaked accord with burning blight.  
Sweet sleep is near to death, as day doth steal  
The stars from bleeding skies, and thee from me:  
The flood of time admits to no appeal,  
And leaches greater debt from flesh flown free.  
Stay here. Wake not. Within my arms, abide.  
I cannot stop the dawn, but I can hide."

The audience, and the judges, were silent. There was a breath, then a ripple of murmurs, and then a thunderclap of applause from the whole room all at once.

Jaskier actually leapt from his seat to applaud, cheer, screech, and holler encouragement to Essi. Geralt stood hesitantly, then realized the rows behind them were all up as well. He straightened more confidently, clapping louder, and added his own calls of encouragment. It was the longest ovation the room had yet offered, and Essi took two bows before sweeping off. No wonder they had put her last in the lineup.

The room gradually quieted, but into murmurs and conversation as the audience milled about and wandered out: it was midafternoon, and the performances of the Poesy Trial were concluded. Only the judging remained, and there was no audience for that part. Geralt stretched, surreptitiously keeping an eye out for the disapproving man as he turned all the way around. No, the discomfort was gone, and so was the man. They'd have no witcher-bothering trouble from him on their way out.

Jaskier was still bouncing, even as he hoisted his bag and lute case over his shoulder to lead Geralt out of the hall.

"So it was good?" Geralt thought Essi's poem had been good, but he knew he wasn't exactly an expert, despite having traveled with one for some time.

Jaskier's agile hands fluttered into shapes that described unfamiliar terms. "It's a Kerackian sonnet in form, but an alba by subject, and it _still_ conforms to the subject restrictions."

Geralt stared blankly.

"It's about someone waking up from a night of love, into an unwelcome dawn when their time for loving has to be over. That's an alba, it's more of a genre than a form."

"Hm." Geralt could sympathize. People weren't up and about at night much, to criticize things they disapproved of. He guessed most people couldn't see anything in the dark to disapprove.

"And the form, it's three quatrains and a couplet, pretty standard sonnet, but the quatrains are opposing rhymes rather than--never mind, it's just, it fits very exactly into a particular and very specific scheme, one of two common kinds that anybody here with the training could do, but it matches the template so perfectly that the departures are extremely obvious, and they highlight the metaphors she used in those places really beautifully, it's hard to explain--"

"All right, so it's good." Geralt held the door of the Hall of Disputations for Jaskier so he wouldn't bump his case.

" _Yes_ , it's _fantastic_ , the department should pay her for it and publish it as an exemplar of the form, except nobody writes sonnet-albas, it's such a unique combination. She may be setting a new fashion. I've got to try one when this is over--"

"So she'll win?" Geralt liked the idea.

"That's the thing, the combination's such a risk, it's so weird, I'm not sure the judges are going to like it. Most of the panel are extremely conservative, and the fact that the speaker isn't made explicitly clear--"

"You mean it's not her?" Geralt didn't realize Essi hadn't been speaking from her own experience. The poem seemed very direct.

Jaskier stopped on his way out of the front door of the building, silhouetted in the fading afternoon sun, turning back to him. "Oh, Geralt, no, the rules for this set are that it has to be a reflection on a passage from one of the three canonical books of Melitele. There's the Book of Ellander, the oldest one, which I think there are plenty of copies of running around, Ellander's the biggest Temple of Melitele on the Continent, and then there's the Viziman Tome--you've probably seen one of the illuminated copies, since I know you spent time at St. Lebioda's hospital in Vizima, it used to be a temple of Melitele--and the last one's the Lyrian Codex, which is much less common to quote from or reflect on. Haven't you been to Lyria? Their royal family married their kingdom right into Rivia at one point--"

"So the poems have to be about Melitele?" Geralt ushered them both out of the way of the door, nodding to the boy they'd seen on the way in, who was still very inclined to stare wistfully at Jaskier.

"Sorry, yes, not only that, but they have to be about one of the stories in those three books, which have some overlap. But Essi picked a pretty obscure story from the book people use the least often, so seldom that the judges had to actually open it and follow along, which they almost never do." 

Geralt hadn't noticed that. He hadn't been watching the judges since the performances got better, in the second half of the morning. He hummed.

Jaskier elaborated as he led them down a new and unfamiliar street at the back of the all-gods temple, lined with hawkers in full cry. "Melitele's the goddess of motherhood, but there aren't a lot of stories floating around about how she came to be a mother, and the Lyrian Codex has just a few mentions of a night she spent with a nameless god in an already-harvested barley field that subsequently grew a miraculous second crop by morning. I don't know it very well, hardly anyone does, but I think there's maybe one reference to blocking out the light of dawn to spend longer with her paramour?"

"Hm." Geralt cast his mind back over the competitors' poems that he could remember, and his new knowledge of the subject restrictions put them in a slightly different light, but it wasn't a huge change. He was on good terms with several priestesses of Melitele, but he wasn't especially familiar with the goddess herself beyond the pretty pervasive basics.

"Yes, so Essi really deftly parlayed that extremely thin narrative connection with the goddess in the barley field into a shockingly gorgeous alba. She's so sensitive, she always takes things so personally, and as hard as it makes her life, it's very, very good for her poetry--"  
  
"It's raw." Geralt had felt pretty torn up, dreading dawn and loss, just from hearing some words.

"Yes, not many albas mention gorge or acid or blights, honestly, it's so visceral and evocative, but one of the main precepts of all three of the books of Melitele used in the judging is that, oh man, she's the goddess of healing and childbirth, and that's a messy business, literally visceral, full of guts and innards and stuff. It's a raw life. I hope the judges see that, why it's so perfect for the subject and this round and the whole competition. Oh, I'm so proud of her."

Geralt smiled. Jaskier beamed back, striding there at his side.

"The performance itself was flawless, too, she did so well!" Jaskier was rarely so effusive about anyone else's work.

Geralt made an inquiring noise.

"It wasn't an easy bunch of words to speak in a row, honestly," Jaskier exclaimed. "It's a rough ride when somebody stumbles reciting their own poem, as I think you saw in the earlier rounds."

"Huh." It had been a little painful, actually, to see some of the younger competitors blush over their obvious missteps, even with the supportive audience.

"That sonnet is nearly a tongue-twister with all the alliteration at the ends of the lines, and the consonances even across caesurae--"

"Mm?" Geralt recognized many of the words Jaskier was saying. Not all of them.

"Uh, it's all--a lot of the sounds starting the words were the same in some expected places and some unexpected ones, not usually a kind of consideration you apply to a sonnet, very technical, don't worry about it, but--"

Geralt seized on a point of familiarity. "Ah, like stem harmony."

"Yes, like--hm, like what?" said Jaskier, caught off guard.

"In Skellige," Geralt elaborated, gesturing for Jaskier to complete the lesson.

Instead, he stopped dead, looking at Geralt with a slightly uncomfortable intensity he usually reserved for the verses that described various kinds of pursuit in his racier late-night tavern performances. "In Skellige?" he repeated, and mimicked Geralt's on-with-it handwave.

"With, you know, the poems..." Geralt tried.

Jaskier put his hands on his hips, uncharacteristically silent, and waited. Geralt was beyond fidgeting, but he felt the unusual impulse. Jaskier sighed, and then waved grandly at the bustle surrounding them. They were on the cobbled lane between the temple and the student housing, so it was a considerable bustle. "How many Skelligers do you think there are at this Gamut?"

Come to think of it, Geralt hadn't seen anybody in a Skelligan tunic and trews, or even the less formal kirtle, at the opening concert. As he glanced around them, it was a bright mess of Redanian and Temerian doublets, some Aedirnian and Kaedweni cotehardies, fine gowns in Cintran and Toussaintois fashion, and the occasional Koviri embroidery on the collars and hems of shirts and breeks. Coming out of the Hall of Disputations, they had even passed a small contingent of Ofieri tourists in their fluffy turbans and filmy silks, looking slightly uncomfortable in the early spring snap. Nowehere had he seen an Islander's quilted formal gown or voluminous fur stole, and definitely none of the bright cross-gartering they were so fond of on sleeves or legs.

Geralt bristled. Then he sighed. "There aren't any, are there?" he grumbled, resigned to playing the ignorant brute.

Jaskier's weirdly predatory regard softened. "Do you know many Skelligers, then?" he asked, curious.

"I've been to the Isles a few times," Geralt admitted.

"Enough to learn some poetry?" Jaskier prodded. "The Continent mainly regards them as merciless pirates, Geralt. Nobody gets to just, you know, go to the Isles and hear their lore, and when they show up on our shores, it's usually a better idea for poets to run than to talk."

"They're proud," Geralt agreed. He'd had a hard time finagling enough respect there to be accepted by the court to do what he came for. There had been both fistfights and swordfights involved in earning that respect.

"You don't say," Jaskier murmured, uncharacteristially patient. He took Geralt's hand, a mild and warm surprise, and led him to stand under the eaves of a grand house overlooking the cobbles, where they would be out of the way of the increasingly urgent traffic. "But you're one to be proud of, any decent marauder could see that, so I don't doubt they shared their pride in poetry with you," Jaskier continued, and looked expectant.

"Um, yeah," Geralt said, wrong-footed by the compliment. He eyed the pile of city road trash that had been swept up against the house. "Pride and honor, mostly, are the subjects. And, uh, a denser structure. To the poetry. It doesn't rhyme. It works differently." He looked back out at the street, where the pace had picked up even further. There must be some Gamut event starting soon in the temple hall. He looked down at their tracks, which would be rendered unreadable with the volume of foot traffic.

"Geralt." Jaskier's tone was flat. When Geralt glanced back up at him, though, he didn't look incredulous. He was so focused, and not on an instrument. It was unfamiliar. "Do you know Skelligan poetry?" he asked, as though the fate of nations hung in the balance.

"I guess I heard some at the an Craite court," Geralt confessed. There had been a skald. And the an Craite king had responded in some kind of ritual word contest. It was mostly the brawling he thought of when the occasion came to mind, but everyone had stopped to hear the recitation of Freya's deeds.

"Do you. Remember any." Jaskier gritted out, pained, visibly refraining from the artistic tirade building behind his teeth.

"Let me see," Geralt considered. "Hm."

Jaskier whisked his flocked wool half-cape off from under the strap of his lute case, stepped nimbly behind Geralt further into the lea of the fine house, and cleared the ground of detritus with his foot. He lay the cape out on the bumpy stone in an elegantly embroidered burgundy semicircle and made a grandiose gesture, apparently expecting Geralt to sit on the cape. "Meditate, or do some Axii on yourself, just, Geralt, please tell me about this Ann Crate court tradition." Geralt could hear him spelling the Skelligan name wrong.

Geralt acquiesced to kneel on the wool, and Jaskier folded cross-legged on the cobbles before him like a child before a storyteller. Or like countless tavern audiences before Jaskier himself. The intent look wasn't going away.

"I'm, hm." Geralt closed his eyes and cast his mind to the evening on the biggest Skelligan Isle when he'd been mellow on mead and professional success, and the friendly infighting between the high tables in the longhouse had been quelled for an offering to their sea goddess. The lines had a blunt, compact craft to them, and stuck in his memory.

He cleared his throat awkwardly, dimly sure he must seem a gruff parody here on the loud, dirty street, in the light of Essi's masterful performance. He was not made for this. But Jaskier's focus still weighed on him like a trawling net in a fast current. He took a breath, collating the lines he remembered from the Skelligan skald's praise of Freya.

"The fiercest must fear, if their fate be  
To stall the stern, here beneath her stare.  
Much shall be missed, if they make not  
The god-price free-given, where goes she;  
Pain the more proud, to provide from little,  
Woe the wealthier, to give from want.  
Shame will show high, if she, Shining One, bless not.  
Wave-woman, water-mother, one need but wait:  
To see her is to soar, to surge sea-cutting."

He opened his eyes, expecting either mocking skepticism or kind condescension. Jaskier was enthralled. He wasn't even writing in his notebook. Geralt knew he had it with him.

"Oh, wow." Jaskier's face was glowing with a kind of furious, sweet wonder. "That's--that's. It's like--but not, it's different, but it has so much in common--Yeah," he said.

Geralt grunted, unwilling to ask.

"My disputations, to graduate when I finished at the Academy, were on the commonalities between--they were on some stuff. Related to this. That this may be related to. Melitele's tits, Geralt, I could do so much work on this."

Geralt frowned. "I don't remember any more."

"This much is enough! There are echoes of--it doesn't matter, if I can write this down as an example of the Skelligan line of alliterative poetry, I could--"

Geralt tried to forestall the frenzy. "Crach had this whole response that was at least as good as the bits I remember from the skald."

"Crach?"

"The jarl. The man in charge of the an Craite court. I guess he's king now."

"King--of Skellige? And he had a response? Wait, are you telling me these poems are improvised?"

"Not always. The jarl of Clan Heymaey had some memorized." 

"You know _more than one_ of the poet-kings of the Skellige Isles."

"The Lioness of Cintra married one! They're not vanishing dragons!"

"Eist assimilated to be accepted by the Cintran populace, Geralt, he wasn't exactly running classes on--on stem harmony!"

This was a reasonable point. Geralt grunted. "Maybe you can ask Ciri about it."

"Maybe," Jaskier said, with one last long look at Geralt. He stood gracefully, then stumbled on the hem of the cape he'd lain out for Geralt. He grinned sheepishly, and offered Geralt a hand up from the ground. "Come on. Since we're in the neighborhood, do you want to talk to that dyer I was seeing?"

Geralt took his hand, still warm in the spring air, and levered himself up from the ground. Jaskier was always stronger than people gave him credit for, especially standing next to Geralt. "Probably a good idea."

Jaskier retrieved his cape and brushed it off. "He didn't seem like the vindictive sort, but I've been wrong before," he said quietly.

Geralt tried not to get preemptively angry. The dyer probably hadn't done anything. "What's his name?"

"Piers. He was always trying to make terrible puns about it." Jaskier led the way down a slightly pungent alley.

"Where'd you meet him?" Geralt contemplated the mutual acquaintances a dyer and a bard might have, imagining a meeting at some fancy tailor Jaskier frequented or an encounter at a bazaar.

"Well, he was coming to take the dockside pisspots in for the day and I had an urgent deposit to make," Jaskier said with characteristic elegance. "He got an eyeful of my equipment when he let me contribute to his collection and I guess he liked what he saw."

"Just like that?" Geralt never ceased to be amazed by the immediacy of Jaskier's conquests, but he tried not to show it.

"Not quite, but close enough." Jaskier didn't even blush.

The alley opened into the fish-and-slops-redolent air of the Oxenfurt waterfront, and Geralt could have led them to the dyers' locale by scent alone even if they hadn't been visible a short distance down the quay. Their acrid tubs were open to the elements, bubbling and still, garments and linens all soaking or being stirred and prodded by burly women with girded loins and shirtless men in stain-spattered short trousers. One of the men, admittedly well-built and incongrously aristocratic in the face, saw them approaching.

"Julian?" He didn't seem especially surprised, but he also didn't have the furtive or guilty look Geralt might expect from someone confronted with an ex he'd just tried to sabotage. It was hard to discern the subtler scents of humanity in the onslaught of the dyers' surrounding work, but he didn't have the tang of panic, which Geralt thought he could probably have caught even through the miasma, and his heartbeat wasn't unusual for someone engaged in moderate labor.

"Piers! Lovely to see you." Jaskier stood with a calculated insouciance, one hip cocked.

"Yes, I just got back yesterday," Piers said, nodding politely to Geralt.

"Oh, is that right?" Jaskier inquired vaguely, betraying no particular interest.

"My mastery evaluations were at the guildhall in Brugge, all six weeks of them," Piers said proudly. "I'm a journeyman no more. You're looking at a Master Dyer of Oxenfurt, one of only four in the city."

"Congratulations," Geralt said.

"This is my friend Geralt, in town to see the Bards' Gamut," Jaskier hastened to introduce him. "Geralt, Piers Dyer, newly a Master, and what an accomplishment. Piers, congratulations from me as well, and what luck we ran into you. We were just looking for a healing charm for a persistent ache Geralt suffers in his elbow, old witchering injury, you know. Would you happen to know a person hereabouts who might be able to provide such a thing?"

Geralt suppressed a sigh and played along, rubbing his elbow. "Nothing major, just a banishing hex might do for it."

Piers looked a little askance at Geralt. "I don't go in for much like that. Magic doesn't leave the dye as colorfast, you know. It's not real." He withdrew slightly, looking like he wanted to go back to his work. "You might try the doctor instead. Just the other side of the quay, slightly off the harbor and down the road to the Western Gate. Nice tall place, built right against the harbor wall, you can't miss it." He turned away, not rudely, but clearly intending to end the conversation.

"A lovely idea. Thanks very much, Piers. See you around." Jaskier was also already turning away.

"Bye, Piers," Geralt said, going with him.

Piers waved, his eyes already evaluating the state of all the tubs he'd left to talk with them.

They strolled southerly along the docks for a moment, out of earshot of the dyers, until Jaskier couldn't contain himself. "Didn't even have to ask him where he was over the last week or so. It takes forever to get here all the way from Brugge, and if his guildhall had him sitting mastery evaluations for six damn weeks--"

"Yeah, it wasn't him," Geralt granted. "He didn't seem to like the idea of magic, either," he observed.

"Sure you don't want to see the doctor for your elbow?" Jaskier pestered.

"My elbow's fine. But we can go to the doctor anyway, if you want," Geralt teased back. "I'm sure something's wrong with you."

"Something's wrong with the both of you, as usual," a friendly voice called from the stoop of the house they were passing.

It was the doctor in question. "Shani!" Jaskier cried, delighted. "It's been months!"

The delicate-looking redhead blew a raspberry. "We both live here, so whose fault is that? Geralt, you're too thin! What outrageous feats of physical endurance have you been up to?"

"Hello, Shani," Geralt smiled, accepting her enthusiastic hug. She only came up to his collarbones.

"He rode from the arse-end of Kaedwen all the way here in a week to see me play, so you can blame me for his precarious health," Jaskier said, smiling winningly.

"Are you two on your way somewhere or do you have time for a swig and a bite?" Shani held Geralt at arm's length and evaluated his physique in the way only a trained and experienced field medic could. "My kitchen's right here and I don't have to be back at the Academy for an hour."

"You sure you won't be missing some grand Meeting of Deans?" Jaskier was halfway to her door.

"You're a Dean?" Geralt turned to regard Shani. "That's amazing."

"Dean of Medicine of Oxenfurt Academy, that's my life now, when I can't escape to do some real work," she said.

"I can't believe you really have an hour of free time, not when I haven't seen you in so long and all my students are constantly trying to get me to trade on our acquaintance." Jaskier didn't hesitate at her door, letting himself in when he found it unlocked. "What are you blowing off to administer food and salubrious remedies to our constantly-mauled friend?"

"I'm fine," Geralt protested.

"Nothing big." Shani's fingers pressed unerringly into the elbow Jaskier had indicated as an "old injury" to Piers, testing his range of motion as she walked him up the steps of her stoop and inside. "What's happened here? You're not usually susceptible to cartilaginous scarring," she worried.

"I'm fine," Geralt repeated, trying to reclaim his elbow. "It's just a little endrega bite. Bit of a nest on the way here, cleared it out without even stopping," he assured her.

She crossed immediately to the shelf that covered the entire back wall of her herb-festooned kitchen and traced over a row of exotically-colored glass bottles before picking one out to hand to him. "Drink that right now and let me wrap that elbow in willowbark."

"I can get my own antivenom, I know it's not cheap," Geralt started.

"Perks of running an entire School of Medicine," Shani dismissed. "Drink it."

Geralt did as he was told, and let his elbow be extended and his shirtsleeve rolled back as Shani wrapped the joint in warm willowbark and tied it on with a bandage.

"You let me do all that work on your shoulders and didn't tell me you had an actual knot in your elbow?" Jaskier scolded. "I thought you were just holding it that way because you felt weird without your swords on your back," he said, aggrieved.

"It's fine," Geralt protested, unable to justify the attention. "I'm fine. The massage was good, helpful," he offered.

"Massage wouldn't do for an endrega bite anyway," Shani saved him. "This should clear it up fast, the way you heal," she affirmed. "Now let's get some real chow into both of you. If I know how you live, you've both been subsisting entirely on sticks," she probed.

"That may be true," Jaskier hedged.

Geralt nodded. They were good sticks.

Shani rolled her eyes and took three substantial stoneware bowls down from a cupboard. "Here," she said, shoving one each into Jaskier's and Geralt's midsections. "You both get a big scoop from the stewpot," she prompted, indicating an improbably large cauldron standing over the banked coals of her kitchen fire.

Geralt and Jaskier exchanged glances. "How medicinal is this stewpot?" Jaskier inquired.

"Oh, shut up, it tastes fine," Shani bullied. "Eat it. Look at Geralt," she gestured to his bare forearm where it showed under the bandage. "His stupid muscle fibers are showing. What have you been drinking? Anything like water? Or are you trying to get it from your food like a Zerrikanian lizard?"

"We had a surfeit of the Abbey's finest beer last night, and he can take care of himself," Jaskier attempted.

"But he doesn't," Shani interrupted.

Jaskier looked appraisingly at Geralt, a different expression in his eyes than when he first saw Geralt had arrived in Oxenfurt. "That's surprisingly true," he conceded, and took Geralt's bowl. "He takes care of everyone else, instead."

He filled both bowls from the ominous cauldron and took a cautious sip from his. "Honestly, not as bad as I expected," he pronounced. "A little more solid than one might expect from stew, certainly."

"You're in no position to criticize anyone's cooking, boyo," said Shani. "I didn't light the entire refectory kitchen on fire trying to fry an egg in my second year."

"I'll apparently never live it down," Jaskier complained. "She told the students where the burns on the counters came from, and now none of them respect me."

"The counters, Jaskier? All of them? How did you even get the fire off the stove?" Shani gestured for Jaskier to make faster progress on his stew.

"He still can't cook eggs," Geralt observed.

"Fine, I'm leaving it to the professionals and concerned friends," Jaskier surrendered. "I'll eat whatever you make, just stop tarnishing my reputation."

"That ship's been wrecked for decades," Shani laughed.

Jaskier winced, leaning defeated against Shani's high countertop. "I should know better than to attempt drawing my shreds of dignity together in the presence of someone who witnessed my first serenade and someone else who incessantly saves me from monsters and mosquitoes alike."

Geralt set his bowl down on the counter, empty. "Did I do it right?" he inquired of Shani.

She inspected the bowl. "Looks good to me. Keep doing that regularly, and you'll be less tired, you'll grow back some reserves, and the absurd injuries you incur so frequently will return to their usual nearly-instant rate of healing instead of the merely miraculous. Will you take another one?"

"Fine," Geralt yielded. "I'll chomp my fodder." He took back the bowl Shani had refilled. "None of us has dignity in the face of a prescription for overfeeding."

"So how is the medico-academic administratorial life, anyway? Do you still get to sew anybody up regularly?" 

Jaskier broached the topic of Shani's work, and though she protested the hours, the meetings, the colleagues, the boredom, and the concept of committees, it was clear she felt she was doing good, and she did still get her hand in with actual medicine now and then.

Her unconstrained hour passed quickly and uproariously in conversation, reminiscence and contemplation of future plans both, and she managed to pour a beaker of fresh blackberry juice and a flagon of watered sweet ale down Geralt's gullet before she was exchanging hugs with them again and they were all stepping down from her stoop to go their separate ways.

"What now?" Geralt asked Jaskier.

"Well. If you're done digesting and feeling feisty, the Pipers' Battle starts about now, and once we stop by the room to drop the Borsody off, I don't have to be anywhere until this evening."

"What's the Pipers' Battle?"

"You won't need your swords, if that's what you're thinking," grinned Jaskier, hefting his lute case.

The Pipers' Battle was a dance.

Well, it was a competition, solo players and bands both, but it was the loud stuff; shawms, horns and crumhorns, trumpets, sackbut choirs, and myriad intimidatingly large drums. Outdoor instruments all, and it was held in the same square the opening concert had been. You could hear it from half the city away, and people did, and they came to dance. Geralt didn't know how the judges could deal with either the sound of the players from so close or the roar of the crowd from the other side, but they sat in a semicircle immediately in front of the dais, nearly in danger of being trampled by the more enthusiastic and less skilled dancers. Geralt looked again, and recognized Hildegarda in the semicircle, and he was sure she saw them as well, facing half-out as she was to survey the brass section of the band that was currently playing a lively oberek.

"Come on, grumpychops, the dance floor awaits, and I never get to kick up my heels. I'm always playing. Take a turn with me!" Jaskier smiled winsomely at him and held out a hand.

Geralt grunted. There was no lute to brood over, as they'd stashed it back at Corbel House (checking the lock on the little under-stairs door three times, naturally), and Jaskier wouldn't be in any more danger from a saboteur in the middle of the crowd than he would at the edges. Geralt couldn't really see the harm, so he took Jaskier's hand. Hildegarda didn't smirk, and every outward indication showed that she was concentrating on the band's performance, but Geralt knew she was smirking internally.

"Do you know the oberek steps?" Jaskier inquired, dragging him through the undulating crowd, closer to the band.

Geralt regarded the people surrounding them, festooned with flowers and dripping with sweat despite the chill of the fading sun. There seemed to be several options for steps, one a never-ending twirl of pairs in a circle like a series of cross-body parries, one a measured three-step like a switch back and forth between high and middle guard, one a trade-off of low back jump-kicks and lifts like a silly collaborative wrestling match. Geralt eyed a pair of men galloping through the latter.

"No," he answered Jaskier, and gripped him by the forearm with the hand he wasn't already holding, throwing him backwards at an angle calculated to put them in the circle for the jump-kicks.

Jaskier stretched his legs in the circling kick almost reflexively, and beamed at him with a breathless, incredulous giggle. "Sure you don't," he said, and pulled closer to Geralt on the beat, throwing him in turn and then using the momentum to jump again, twirling up over his shoulder into his place in the circle.

"I learn moves fast, though," advised Geralt, and spun him again.

"I guess you would, wouldn't you," said Jaskier, and they flew through the spins, kicks, and lifts of the oberek, getting it mostly right and standing out by the sheer height of the jumping turns they could manage together, laughing like children.

It was another oberek, a mazur, and a galliard before Jaskier would let Geralt lead him out of the crowd to sit on the edge of a garden wall and chug a cider from a little kiosk doing a brisk Pipers' Battle business. Jaskier was puffing like he'd never stop, but still smiling wider than ever.

"Whoo! I should have known better than to challenge you in the physical realm," he gasped. "It's just that you never have any fun," he added, gulping his cider.

"I have plenty," Geralt said mildly.

"I usually have to drag you screaming into the fun, though, admit it." Jaskier straightened his long legs as he hoisted himself further onto the low wall.

"I have never screamed in my life," Geralt lied.

Jaskier let it slide. "You've never had the right kind of fun, then," he huffed, and raised a hand to the side of Geralt's face.

Geralt let himself glance heavenward, not quite rolling his eyes. "I do fine, thanks," he said, half into Jaskier's hand.

"I know you do," Jaskier muttered to himself, chest still heaving, and brushed a strand of Geralt's hair behind his ear.

The band of shawms that had played their galliard finally made it off the dais and a single piper replaced them. She started an intricate jig, her little reed soaring over the crowd. The people nearest the stage started clapping the beat, and though surely it made the judges' work harder, none of them tried to quell it, and soon the whole square was jumping, clapping, and turning a toe to the piper's tune.

Jaskier, however, looked a little sad. "Is it the wind solos already?" he asked.

"Why, don't you cut a jig as well as you jump a galliard?" Geralt teased him.

"Believe me, my friend, I would like nothing better," Jaskier said gravely, and took his hand from Geralt's face, "but I'm on the panel to judge the Childrens' Concours this evening."

"Ah," Geralt said, turning away and taking a sip of his cider. The sun was touching the roofs of the one-story houses at the west side of the square, edging them with orange light. People had lit lamps and torches on the balconies.

"Don't wait up for me," Jaskier sighed, gaining control of his breathing, and handing Geralt the heavy brass key to their room. It was still warm from his pocket. "It's not going to be all that late when I'm done, but you need to get some dinner, and the rest of our fellow denizens of the Corbel House Understairs have engagements this evening as well." He gestured to Hildegarda, still sitting at the foot of the dais.

"What will you do for food?" Geralt asked.

"They'll have something at the Concours," Jaskier assured him.

"You don't want me to come with you?" The saboteur might well be there, Geralt didn't say.

"I don't think the singing would particularly interest you on this one," Jaskier answered. That was a no.

Well, Geralt supposed Jaskier had taken care of himself in Oxenfurt many a winter without him, and the lutes, both broken and borrowed, were safe in the room. "All right," he said.

"Don't stay up too late," Jaskier smiled, but it was a little pale compared to how he had been beaming while he jumped and whirled through the line of dance. The last reddish rays of westering sun lit a copper crown on his disheveled hair as he walked purposefully out of the square.

"I won't," Geralt said to his back.

The whooping, clapping, pulsating crowd closed behind him. Geralt didn't feel much like dancing now.

He wondered where he could get a bath.

~

Tess walked in on Geralt in the tub, of course.

The porter of Corbel House had officiously commanded the sturdy and capacious wooden tub, and the hot water, from a pair of lads who were connected to the Academy in some way Geralt couldn't quite discern, and Geralt appreciated not having to carry it to the room himself. He was almost done shaving, pondering spells he knew of that might banish glue, when a key turned loudly in the lock.

"Hi," he said, from where he sat curled in on himself to keep as much as he could underwater, excepting Shani's bandage on his elbow, which he hadn't bothered to take off but didn't intend to get wet.

"I won't bite," Tess said dismissively, setting her bag on the table that took up all the room the tub wasn't occupying. Then she looked at him again. "Unless you want me to," she amended.

"I'm good, thanks," Geralt said. "I thought everybody was busy tonight until late?" He would have hurried a little if he'd known anyone would be back before the last bell.

"The Poesy Trial judging didn't take as long as usual. Bet you can guess why," Tess smirked, crossing her arms in satisfaction.

"Do you know Essi, too?" Geralt inquired.

"She's just as much of a firebrand in Rhetoric as she is in Poetry," Tess confirmed, admiringly. "I managed to shout down the sticks-in-the-mud on the panel that wanted to dock her points for nontraditional form. A sonnet's a pretty damn traditional form," she groused.

"So she won?" Geralt hoped so.

"The six-hundred-crown prize and the pick of the continent's royal patrons are hers. She'll do very well with them," Tess said smugly.

"She will," Geralt agreed. "She's sensible."

"In some ways," Tess qualified. "No poet can be too sensible, I think, but she'll be fine."

"Um, can you hand me my shirt?" Geralt asked.

"Why bother? I'm just going to jump in bed with you." Tess gave his chest another glance, but she didn't seem to linger over his scars.

"I--" Geralt started, looking around the room, to avoid looking at his bandage. It wasn't a serious vulnerability, but it was obvious.

"Calm yourself, man, I know Julian's not around to defend you, and you don't seem to be capable of speaking up on your own behalf, so it isn't any fun to tease you when he's not here." Tess uncrossed her arms and tossed him his shirt from where it hung on the chair.

"Thanks," he grunted.

"I'll even get us a late dinner if you haven't eaten, and let you dress without peeking. What do you like?" She busied herself fishing coins out of the inner pocket of her bag.

"Whatever you're having," Geralt said, tossing her his own coin purse from where he'd lain it next to the tub.

"Sausage and rolls, then." She tried to give his money back, but he stared her down, and she smiled and hung it at her belt. "Ah, there's the famous yellow glare of the White Wolf," she said. "I'll get the next one, if you'll let me."

"You'll have to fight Jaskier for it," he said, feeling somehow victorious for winning a staring contest with a rhetorician from a tub on the floor.

"He certainly wouldn't fight for the privilege of paying for anyone else's meal," she said, and let him have the room.

Geralt had decided not to bother with the shirt after all, by the time she returned. He did put his linen braies back on, but he judged it better to let himself dry before adding any other clothes.

"Three for you, three for me," said Tess, handing him his coin purse and a trio of sausages which were, of course, pinned their whole lengths through on sticks and accompanied by fresh, crusty rolls.

"Thanks," he said, trying one. It was hot.

Tess laughed at him, then looked impressed as he swallowed it depsite the temperature. He was used to worse draughts.

"So who do you think broke the lute?" Geralt asked, settling at the little table, propping his head on one hand and contemplating the sticks in the other.

Tess sat down across from him. "It was Valdo Marx," she said, and bit the end off her sausage decisively.

Geralt looked at her. "Do you know something we don't?"

"No, I probably know the least out of all of us here, but the way Julian talks about him--that kind of animosity doesn't come from nowhere." She didn't speak quite as elegantly with her mouth full as Jaskier could.

"I thought you wanted Jaskier to talk to him?" Geralt frowned.

"I do. I think he'll learn more from it. They'll explode, maybe, but it'll still be information." She cocked her head. "Then again, Julian's been avoiding the subject for decades. Maybe you'll learn, instead."

Geralt hummed. "Hildegarda said Marx doesn't know magic."

"You, of all people, know that tasks of which one is personally incapable can be hired out to people with the skills to perform them." She drummed her fingers on the table. "I don't know of any working witches, mages, or charm sellers here who could banish the glue out of a lute, but the way the Eternal Flame's been after every hint of magic lately, that doesn't mean there aren't any."

Geralt scraped his chair back a little so he could reach the bag under the bed, and carefully emptied it out onto the table. The pieces still felt unpleasantly soapy, and his medallion made an irritating little catch against his chest. Not enough to call a buzz or a hum, but enough that he knew it was there. He scratched absently underneath it, trying to smooth away the sensation as he looked at the pieces of the lute.

"Can I see that?" Tess asked, surprising him.

"This piece?" He asked, offering her the long curved rib of Brokilon yew.

"Your medallion," she specified, waving at it.

"Well, no," he said. He kept it on. It wasn't for people to mess with.

She smiled. "Ah, he can refuse, after all," she drawled, "even when his bard's not here to protect him."

"Cut the bullshit, Tess," Geralt grumbled. "I'm not helpless, and you're not some kind of predatory tramp."

"Shows how much you know," she sniffed, then relented, slouching over the table with her sticks, mirroring him. "I'm sorry. I know I come on strong. I irritate even Julian sometimes with the game, but I don't mean to put you out."

"Try it on with the girl selling steak and squash in the square," Geralt said curtly, and bit his second sausage in half.

"She's a baby," Tess blew out, waving her sticks at him. "This city is full of horny babies," she complained. "You're the first grown thing that's shown up since the last Gamut."

"Sorry to disappoint," he countered, "but surely there is a place in town you could trawl for grownups."

"I suppose," she considered, "but it's a busy life, the life of a nearly-irresistible professional argument-haver. And it's a busy season. It's a busy week."

"Good for you," he said, swallowing the last bite of his sausage. "Get busy, or less busy, in some other bed. All you're getting out of me is a cuddle."

"It'll have to do," she sighed. "Round of gwent for the middle spot in the bed?"

"All right," Geralt conceded, clearing the lute pieces back into their bag. "But I'm better than Hildegarda made me look."

He cleaned up, handily winning the first two rounds. They played the third through, just for something to do, and the result was the same. Conversation ebbed and resurged, ranging from the students Tess and Jaskier had in common ("Tatya and Katya are both immensely talented hellions. Never let them talk you into a drinking contest. Well, maybe a witcher would do all right--") to the vagaries of their respective professional lives. Tess admitted she'd rather not deal with the mess of killing monsters, or the foibles of the people who considered him one, while Geralt was happy to learn some rhetorical devices that might aid him in convincing reticent contractors to pay up.

It was a particular kind of tiredness that dogged the heels of a festival day. Geralt was pretty durable. He had spent days tracking fleders and ekimmara without rest before, constantly vigilant for the smallest sign lest he be ripped to shreds, but somehow, a day of sitting in a packed hall and rooting for poets, catching up with an old friend, and then keeping up with Jaskier at a dance, was its own kind of drain.

Tess, on the other hand, had had to analyze and evaluate all that poetry. She hid a yawn behind her hand. "I'm whacked," she said, and stood with a groan. "I'll take the inside spot, since you clearly get the middle. Don't wake me when Julian gets back." She peeled unselfconsciously to her shift and slid into the bed, pulling the covers over herself in a way that promised to start a tug-of-war when Jaskier arrived.

Geralt sighed. "What's on for tomorrow?" he asked, wondering when he would start being useful.

"Your boy's got the Concours," Tess answered, already fading.

Geralt had thought that was what Jaskier had said he was busy judging tonight, but he let Tess drift off. Better to meditate till Jaskier got back than be wakened suddenly when he came to bed, Geralt decided, and settled on his knees on the thin rug over the flagstones.

It was a bit of a wrench to find he had slumped sideways into sleep, leaning on the bedframe, when Jaskier tugged him gently to his feet and nudged him into the bed.

"She wouldn't really get you," Jaskier whispered, smiling tiredly. "You could have gone to sleep without me here."

"I know, she's. I'm asleep," Geralt answered, garbled. "You're here," he observed, and drifted back off as Jaskier plastered himself under his arm.

He slept well, but the morning was another surprise. They woke badly, as Tess climbed awkwardly over both of them.

"Sorry boys, it's dumpling day. Get up, if you want some." She managed to avoid kneeing Geralt in the stones, but only by levering her full weight on her thin shin into the meat of his thigh.

He grunted.

Jaskier moaned ostentatiously. "Bring me a dumpling and I'll write you a song cycle," he promised Tess, yawning into Geralt's ribs.

"Don't need one of those. Get your own dumplings," she yawned back at him.

"They really are good," Jaskier mumbled into Geralt's skin. It tickled. "We should get up."

"Aren't there dumplings every day?" Geralt asked, confused. His hair was trying to fit in his mouth the way it did when he went to sleep wet.

"Concours day, special dumplings," Jaskier said, scratching Geralt with his stubble. "Singers like apples and pears for the voice, bakers took notice, it became a thing," he yawned again. "Don't want 'em to run out."

"Okay," said Geralt, and heaved him out of bed. He was heavier than he looked, when he wasn't helping lift his own weight.

"Save me, Tess, I've been ousted," Jaskier said melodramatically from the rug.

"Put your clothes on and you can come with me," she said, hauling him up.

"I thought the Concours was what you were judging last night," Geralt said, pulling his clean shirt over his head.

"Children's Concours. They were lovely. Adults are today. I'm directing the Oxenfurt mixed undergrads," Jaskier answered. "Noon sharp."

"Good thing we're up, then," Geralt said. "If you're competing."

"It hardly counts," Jaskier said dismissively. "Alyona's the one who rehearsed them all season. I'm just singing tenor and waving my hands from the end of the row."

"Let's go, gentlemen," Tess hustled. "Dumplings wait for no man, tenor or otherwise."

"Dumplings are for babies," Siegfried muttered from the other bed, finally acknowledging himself awake. Hildegarda was still snoring. It didn't look like they were coming on the dumpling quest.

Geralt almost felt sorry for them, once he had a bite of the apple dumpling Jaskier insisted on buying for him. The crusts flaked into buttery nothingness in his mouth, and the fruit was spiced with a delicate mixture he couldn't quite put his finger on. He tried to savor it, but it melted deliciously down his throat and he bought another two for himself, and another one each for Tess and Jaskier.

"All right, this can be breakfast," Tess laughed. "I'll leave you two to your gluttony, as I have some meetings this morning."

"Anything before noon sharp?" Geralt asked Jaskier, licking possibly-imaginary dumpling remnants from his fingers.

"Free as an extremely free bird, my friend," Jaskier answered. "The event does start before I'm on, this time, but my call isn't till half-hour before our turn, to get the ensemble settled."

"So we have an entire extremely early morning to devote to the investigation of the curse on your lute?" Geralt raised his eyebrows.

"Ah, I suppose we do," Jaskier said, his face falling. "I'm ever so grateful, don't get me wrong," he sighed, "but this isn't how I imagined spending my Gamut week."

"Hm," Geralt remarked.

"It's all right, though, since it's you," Jaskier said, pointedly unsmiling. He was trying to do Geralt's scary face. It looked pretty stupid.

"So, the spinster?" Geralt prompted.

"I suppose we could go see her, but I absolutely cannot imagine she has anything to do with it," Jaskier fretted.

Yara was almost too busy to answer the door of the small textile guild where she both lived and worked. It didn't take long to ask her enough questions to determine whether she had the time, inclination, or ability to make Jaskier's lute fall apart.

Geralt concluded that she did not.

Nor did any of the three other women or two men Jaskier could recall having even a short fling with in the vicinity, all of whom were amiable enough but also gave Geralt the impression that they'd wanted to try Jaskier on like a shoe, and had not been interested in the actual person behind the facade of World-Famous Bard. All the less reason they'd have to sabotage his lute, if they weren't especially invested in him or his work. Nor did any of them reveal relations or previous ties of the kind that would put Jaskier in danger. 

By the time the need to get to the Concours Hall was a little more urgent, Geralt's idea of what he might be looking for in a saboteur had dissipated into a fog of interpersonal uncertainty. He couldn't exactly sniff it out with his literal senses, and his medallion wasn't telling him anything in the absence of the actual curse on the lute.

And yet. When Jaskier towed him through the giant, intricately carved doors of the music and poetry building, Tess's certainty was reassuring. She thought the saboteur was Jaskier's rival, and she knew Jaskier in this context, the world of academic-political arguments, feuding departments and competing experts, better than Geralt did. Who was Valdo Marx, anyway? 

Jaskier hurried them to the other side of the atrium from the Hall of Disputations and down a grand corridor to the splendidly painted blue-and-gold Concours Hall just in time to abandon him at the back of the spacious auditorium as he made his way down to a gaggle of hapless-looking students. No one was currently on the stage, but as Jaskier led the kids out of a smaller door at his end of the room, another group made their way on, filing in well-disciplined lines onto raised steps in a formation that looked nearly military. They were even dressed alike in somber black and green, a uniform that looked both ostentatiously expensive and incongruously funereal for a performance.

It seemed the judges had a list of the competing groups, because nothing was announced to the audience, which was considerable, when a page ran from the judges to the group and back to confirm they were the next on the schedule. A few swathes of bared blue velvet showed there were empty seats left in the half of the room closest to the stage, but only one or two spaces together on the long cushioned benches, except for a large blank spot where the people onstage had been sitting. Geralt elected to meander a little closer to the front, but stood to the side and didn't take a seat.

A slightly older gentleman (and he did have the officious air of the minor nobility) took a step forward from the regimented line of people on the stage and made a chopping gesture--but he didn't stop when his hand came down, and he did it again. He kept chopping. He took a deep, obvious breath.

The choir sang. Geralt recognized the Novigrad hymn immediately. Jaskier could sometimes get patriotic coin out of tavern drunks late in the evening with his tear-jerking solo arrangement of it, but this was a much squarer, stodgier version. It was pleasant enough, but a little too slow to feel driving or motivational, and a little too fast to be contemplative. The low voices went impressively low some of the time, but the rest of the voices didn't quite ring with them, to Geralt's ear. The end was as abrupt as the director's chopping motions. Perhaps it was the style. Geralt wasn't an expert.

The director bowed to the judges, and the choir filed off just as militarily as they had come on, out of the small door opposite the one Jaskier had taken his kids through. There must have been some kind of signal, because at the same time, Jaskier's group came back through that door and sat in the hole in the audience the dark-clad group had left, another choir filed onto the stage, and yet another choir trickled out to wherever Jaskier had taken them. It was like a positional sport, as much as a performance. The page made his trip back and forth from the judges to the director of the new choir onstage.

They were much more eye-catchingly dressed, but they were also visibly nervous. One young woman caught herself wringing her hands and placed them stiffly at her sides the way someone had clearly told her to. They wore a variety of colors and sported caps with cascading feathers, which made their occasional trembling much more obvious. Still, Geralt supposed it was how they sounded that mattered.

Ah, they sounded nervous.

Their director was a lot more fluid with his hands, but the sound was too soft for all of it to make it even up to Geralt's level, and he wasn't too far from the stage. It wasn't a matter of quiet for dramatic purposes, either, not if Geralt was reading the director's gestures right, but most of the details of the song were unintelligible, and that made them unmemorable. The choir got a little more confident as they warmed to their situation, but they still had the aura of a band of timid children. Geralt felt a little sorry for them.

The logistics of the Concours were impeccable, certainly. Geralt wondered, as Jaskier's group swaggered onstage in exactly the manner one might expect from a bunch of students taking advice from Jaskier, whether the competition's organizers were in high demand during the years between Gamuts.

Then he stopped thinking about much at all.

Jaskier gave two graceful little twirls with his hand, like he was petting the air, and his choir's strong voices cascaded forth like a sudden break in the canopy of a forest. They were sending and turning and shifting a melody through all the voices in turn, and then folded back into one, taking off with a jubilant sweep.

Geralt didn't know the song. The parts were so intricate, channeled together and peeling apart, calling and answering and echoing, leaving a striking gap that revealed the movement underneath and then coming back together in the same rhythm, it was almost too complex to perceive. But it wasn't: it was the interlocking perfect fit of the gears turning a mill wheel, with the same inevitable motion and relentless undercurrent that a water-driven wheel moved by. The surface of the music rippled, too, like light and shadow over the structure underneath, and Geralt could scarcely believe anymore that it was being sung by people's voices, but there was Jaskier at the end of the double-row of Oxenfurt students, barely lifting a hand anymore now that the time was set and everyone breathed and moved together.

No thoughts about projection or confidence occurred to Geralt as he listened to the choir. He was surprised and perturbed when it was over; he felt as though he had lost time.

Jaskier caught his eye as the choir filed out through the gilded doorframe at the side of the stage, and jerked his chin at the big door he and Geralt had come through to get in.

The post-performance analysis was fierce and grueling, Geralt learned, trailing awkwardly after Jaskier and the choir as they made their way back up to the door on the outside of the auditorium and towards the building's entrance. It was time for lunch and a full celebratory deconstruction.

The occasion demanded a more elaborate meal than even the finest of sticks, and Geralt understood from the consolidation of orders and comfortable delegation that a stop at this particular pie shop and a picnic in the adjoining garden were a concert tradition, even if none of these students had performed in a Gamut before. Geralt opted for a spiced lamb pie, figuring the celebratory mood called for it.

"Everybody knows my friend Geralt," Jaskier addressed the now more representatively rowdy students.

"Saw him after your opening show," bragged one of the young women.

"He's not a painting, Katarzyna," Jaskier balked. "You don't get extra credit for memorizing his symbolism before anybody else."

"Nah, he's a series of increasingly personal compositions from the greatest travelling story-bard in generations," another girl snorted.

"Be nice, and not just to me," said Jaskier, hypocritically.

"I'm a witcher, too," Geralt clarified. "As well as a bunch of songs."

"Where are your swords?" a thin boy with unfortunate acne asked in a very deep voice.

"Hoping I won't need them," Geralt replied.

"Can I see your medallion?" a familiar sharp-faced young woman demanded.

"You may not, Tatiana, and you may stop eyeing him like a griffin with a side of beef, too," Jaskier rebuffed.

"Ah, right, that's your purview," Katarzyna sallied.

"Well, it's certainly not yours. I'd be careful if I were you. Half of the Lodge of Sorceresses likes to keep him on his toes, and it's not the nice half," Jaskier threatened.

"I can put my eyes wherever I want," Tatiana pouted, but her glance at Geralt was distinctly less carnivorous.

"Now, who has the lunch purse?" Jaskier took advantage of the Academy's deep pockets and settled the choir's post-Concours lunch bill. 

Knots of the still-excited students drifted, absorbed in their own performance-related discussions, gradually out of the garden, though Katarzyna and Tatiana took some shooing before Jaskier and Geralt could escape their inquisitive conversation. The garden was nearly empty when a somberly dressed man strode sharply up to the shop for a pie, and Geralt recognized him as the director of the first choir he'd heard.

Jaskier also recognized him, and stiffened like a donkey unwilling to follow a lead. His mouth, so expressively mobile, became a short, thin gouge in his face. His eyes narrowed. Tiny lines showed between his brows and at the corners of his lips, and, for once, he looked his age.

"Valdo," he said, like the name was both a dreadful curse and a matter so disgusting as to be unmentionable in polite society.

"Julian," said the man, warmly, with surprise in his eyes and a faster-than-normal heartbeat.

"Geralt tells me your choir did well," Jaskier forced out.

Geralt had told him no such thing. In fact he had not even thought it.

"Ah, the Butcher of Blaviken," Valdo Marx bowed to Geralt. "I hope our performance was to your taste," he said, sweetly enough that Geralt thought he might mean it. Or he might be viciously condescending. It was hard to say.

"Hm," said Geralt, without punching him.

"What was it you all were singing? We were in the wings for it," Jaskier inquired, as though he could not have heard or recognized the very obvious Novigrad hymn through the door he stood behind as his choir waited to take their place.

"I recognized it," Geralt said. "Hymn of Redania, wasn't it?"

"Ah, the Free City of Novigrad, to be precise," Marx corrected, and tossed his hair. It wasn't quite long enough to do anything but fall back down flat on his forehead. "We're the Valdo Marx Choir of Novigrad," he clarified. "Finest professional choir in Redania, Temeria, and Kaedwen."

"I see," Geralt said.

 _But you don't hear_ , Geralt could absolutely tell Jaskier was thinking, but he managed not to say it.

"And you, Julian? Raising some amateurs to a near-professional level?" Marx was still speaking in a manner that indicated he was flattering Jaskier, but Geralt got the impression that what he was saying was not flattering.

"Students. Just standing in for Alyona, since she's judging and can't compete."

"She'll naturally be abstaining from scoring her own ensemble, then," Marx said, with a faceful of confidence that Alyona would of course do just that.

"Those _are_ the rules," Jaskier agreed.

"Well," Marx stalled. He accepted his pie from the baker's window. "I wish you success in all your endeavors, both of you," he finally said, heartily, a propos of nothing. Geralt wondered if he had been about to wish Jaskier luck in the Gamut and thought better of it.

"Thanks," Geralt said, for form's sake.

Marx sidled out of the garden gate with an eye on Jaskier and Geralt, like he was backing out of an emperor's audience or retreating from an unpredictable enemy. It took longer than Geralt expected. It took a long time. He just kept slowing down and staring.

Finally, he was gone. The hubbub in the street, while still busy by normal standards, had lulled enough that Geralt could hear Marx wasn't eavesdropping at the gate or around a corner.

"You used to be close with him?" Geralt asked, skeptically.

"He didn't even shout," Jaskier marveled. "He didn't insult me once, except by implication."

"He didn't seem too dangerous."

"I hate his damned guts. But I think he may have mellowed in the decade since last we spoke, and I am inclined to agree with you there," Jaskier sighed. "He's mean and supercilious and self-important and whiny and he didn't get his basses to tune for almost that entire supremely boring arrangement of an already uninteresting hymn, but he seemed more nervous than vindictive, which is not at all how I remember him in high-stakes, high-stress performance situations."

"Do you think he broke your lute?" Geralt's senses were all telling him different things, but he had no real evidence, and Jaskier knew Marx. They used to be close.

"I... I kind of don't?" Jaskier brushed pie crumbs off his cuff. "I think he might consider me beneath his notice now?"

"Hm," Geralt replied, torn. "Well, now what?"

"Unless you want to stand menacingly at my shoulder in some committee meetings, you're at liberty to take your ease in the great City of Oxenfurt for Concours day of the Bards' Gamut," Jaskier said wearily.

"Meetings?" It didn't quite fit with Geralt's understanding of how Jaskier operated.

"Life in academia, my friend. I've got to contribute some other way than musically, or all the superlative sonorous success in the world won't save me when they make cuts in the department."

"All right." Geralt waited, eyeing the rustling tops of the young trees edging the walls of the garden. "Do you really want me to come?"

"Oh, of course not, Geralt. I'd never put you through that. You deal with enough pain and rage in your work." Jaskier sighed. "I tell you what, you'd probably get a kick out of the Oxenfurt Library, if you don't have any more leads on the saboteur."

Jaskier was right.

The size of the place was one thing. Jaskier had sent a boy with a message to Katarzyna to vouch for him at the door, so he had no trouble getting in, but that meant she felt it her duty to show him around. There were two separate rooms for books on history, organized chronologically by period discussed, with a catalog index on a mahogany book stand at the front of each room detailing their order chronologically by period written. There was a second-floor balcony under the main stacks' arch-vaulted ceiling, which Katarzyna showed him proudly, containing compilations of poetry from the time of the Conjunction on, and a long corridor bracketed with shelves lined exclusively with Oxenfurt poets. Even the increasingly repressive presence of the anti-magic factions in the city had no dominion over the Oxenfurt Library, and the other side of the open balcony was devoted to writings on magical subjects, wide-ranging enough that they even had some texts he'd never heard of, let alone read.

Katarzyna left him there with a huffy exclamation that he should go see the witch in Market Street if he cared so much about magic. He hardly noticed, elbows-deep in a pile of grimoires and bestiaries. There were reading desks at regular intervals, each with its own little carefully covered lamp, and he lit one with a tiny, absent Igni as he set down his double-armful of books.

The lamp became increasingly helpful as the light from the windows dimmed. He felt the pinch of an incipient headache between his brows, and then all of a sudden it was dark as a tomb and Jaskier was there.

"I thought I might find you here. Having fun, are we?" He asked, scanning the titles of Geralt's already-read stack.

Geralt looked up at him, nonplussed. "Yes," he said. 

"Glad someone is," Jaskier congratulated him, a little whiny. His stomach growled.

Geralt set his book down, and began to gather the mess on the desk to put it back where it had come from.

"Leave them. The librarians will skin you for leather covers if you try to reshelve all of those," Jaskier advised him.

"I know where they go," Geralt protested.

"I'm sure you do, but it's their job, and I'm perishing with boredom and hunger, so I require your immediate assistance."

Geralt followed him out, looking back once at the books on the desk.

Some roasted quince-and-pork sticks later, Jaskier was in a better mood, and feeling magnanimous enough to splurge on another bath, for which he called gaily to the porter as they made their way into the Corbel House quadrangle. Only Siegmund remained in the room when they reached it, fiddling and humming in an improvisatory way that put Geralt in mind of nights on the road with Jaskier. Not a performance, just exercise and maintenance of a skill and a livelihood. Geralt thought regretfully of the lute in pieces under the bed.

"Is that your canso?" Jaskier asked Siegmund.

"Nearly done," Siegmund answered absently.

"He's been saying that for eight months," Jaskier confided to Geralt.

"Not all of us can be as prolific as you," Siegmund said, repeating a passage of four notes in various pairs over and over again, getting faster each time.

"It's gorgeous, you nincompoop. It's done if you want it to be." Jaskier was feeling around in his bag, and something clinked between his fingers as he seemed to get a hold of what he was seaching for.

"Thank you, Julian, but if it doesn't inconvenience you I will keep working on it until the Chief Singing," Siegmund said, most of his attention clearly on his fingers.

"Oh, don't mind us. It'll be lovely accompaniment to a nice relaxing bath." Jaskier extracted a pair of wax-stoppered clay bottles from the depths of his pack and waved them at Geralt. "Chamomile for you, tea rose for me."

"Hm," Geralt acceded. "Who gets the water first?"

"This is Oxenfurt, my friend. I have connections." He leaned in and whispered, "We can each have our own hot water."

Geralt contemplated the luxury. "Two tubs won't fit in here. You go first," he said, hoping the wear of the dayful of meetings wouldn't prevent Jaskier's enjoyment of the treat.

"Much obliged, then," Jaskier grinned, working the wax stopper out of the tea-rose-oil bottle.

He was, of course, insufferable in the bath, but it was such a relief to be on familiar ground that all of Geralt's protests were only for the sake of playing his role. Stop splashing the rug. Don't splash the bed either. No, Jaskier's hairline wasn't receding. Yes, he looked just as he had when they met. 

In point of fact, Geralt thought, regarding Jaskier side-on as he babbled about the expression on Alyona's face when some Academy bigwig said something untenable in the meeting they had apparently both attended this afternoon, Jaskier looked far better than he had when they met. He had grown into himself, his sharp but thin bravado strengthening into real confidence. His astonishing capacity for vulnerability, which made his performances so captivating, had adapted from a discomfiting liability to a warm, accepting openness, a consideration and regard for everyone he met. The way he was now, he was probably a perfect teacher.  
  
It was hard to see on the road, where Geralt's work directed their pursuits, and it had been hard to see through the masks Jaskier put on against his past to talk to Marx, but Jaskier was a success. As a person, his own man. His songs and poetry were, of course, reflections of him, but he didn't need them, or Geralt's purported inspiration of them, to do good, to do well. To be himself. He was a fixture of the community here, and perhaps the Oxenfurt Academy knew what they had, and perhaps they didn't, but his friends here appreciated him, and his students were clearly very lucky.

Perhaps he had grown out of the Path.

"Your turn," Jaskier prodded him as the porter's boys hauled the second serving of bathwater into the room.

"Yes," Geralt fumbled, adrift as the boys took the first tub out of his grasp to dump on the quadrangle's immaculate lawn.

He stared at the cascades of steaming water, hot as he liked it, pouring from the buckets as they filled the tub a second time.

Jaskier's hands carried him out of his distraction, rolling his sleeve up. "How's your elbow?"

"Uh, fine," Geralt said honestly. He hadn't even thought about it after pulling his shirt on over the bandage this morning.

"Witcher fine, or actually fine?" Jaskier asked, peering under the edge of the bandage. "Does it still hurt?"

"No," Geralt said, untucking the end from behind the crease of his elbow and peeling it off, careful to gather the willowbark strips with it before they made a mess on the rug.

"What about your shoulders?" Jaskier inquired. He released Geralt's forearm and set to work unstoppering the chamomile bottle.

"Fine," Geralt said, flexing them as he pulled his shirt off. They were fine.

"Let me see," Jaskier nudged him, looking closely at his back as Geralt bent to step out of his trousers and braies.

"My head's worse than my shoulders," Geralt admitted, sinking gratefully into the scalding water. The porter's boys looked impressed, staring a little as they bowed their way out of the room. He supposed they had just boiled the water. Hotter was almost always better.

"Your head?" Jaskier worried.

"Mhm."

Jaskier felt cautiously around in Geralt's hair with chamomiley hands. "What's wrong? Did you hit it?"

Geralt grunted as Jaskier's fingers found the sad joint of his mandible. "No. I didn't sleep much on the way here. It's catching up with me. Happens sometimes," he reassured Jaskier.

"Ugh, the nobly negligent," Jaskier gave his temple a tiny, tiny slap. The calluses on the tips of his fingers caught in Geralt's hair a little bit. It was nice. "Tell me when you need more sleep, or I'll get Shani," he warned. "We didn't have to get dumplings this morning," he added, still a little worried.

"I liked them," Geralt protested. "It was fine. It doesn't matter, I can still work. And it goes away."

"It does matter," Jaskier grimaced, his fingers clutching Geralt's skull. "But I'm glad it goes away."

"You help," Geralt murmured, hoping Jaskier wouldn't hear him over Siegmund's playing.

Jaskier's fingers calmed. Maybe he did hear. "Well, we've got time for a lie-in tomorrow, at least."

Geralt made an inquiring noise.

"All my futher obligations rest in the Chief Singing, which isn't until the last day of the Gamut," Jaskier explained. "I'd like to see at least one show at the Players' Run, but it doesn't start until after noon. For the light, you know." He washed the ache out of Geralt's hair, smoothing the chamomile into the hinge of his jaw, behind his ear, and down the tendons of his neck. He always seemed to be able to pick out the uncomfortable places and get immediately in their business.

Geralt sighed an affirmative. He let his eyes close. Siegmund was playing through the whole song now, not repeating little moments.

"You're done for the day, aren't you," Jaskier assessed affectionately. "Let me rinse your hair and you can dry off and get in bed."

"Mm," Geralt agreed. He unwound into the brush of fingers over his skin. His head did feel better.

He stood at the gentle prompting of Jaskier's hand under his shoulder blade, and rumbled a little at the comfortable sluice of water as Jaskier squeezed it gently out of his hair and off his limbs, top down, so he wouldn't soak the bedsheets.

"I'm glad I help," Jaskier whispered, laying the blanket half over him so he wouldn't overheat.

Geralt relaxed into sleep.

~

All over the square just across the Guildenstern Bridge were the quick-build, quick-strike stages of the traveling players. The plays weren't simultaneous, of course; the judges had to be able to see all of them. But the troupes all had their own crews and their own platforms they were accustomed to. Some were just a fold-out platform ingeniously built into a single large wagon, but Geralt could see one particular caravanserai that had clearly requested a spot adjacent to the tallest building in the plaza, from which they had run a series of very well-secured lines and a threefold purchase block-and-tackle, which, if he wasn't mistaken about the placement of the pulleys and their counterweights, was capable of lifting these players' entire wagon to a height above the balconies of most of the square. That might be a good show. Were they sailors? What drama even called for a flying wagon? 

He turned to Jaskier, lifting his chin at the rope-festooned stage. "This one."

"Excellent choice, my friend. I've heard good things about the Falling Stars Wandering Circus." Jaskier handed Geralt a lunchtime pasty of mushrooms and cheese, forgoing the slightly wilted-looking mushrooms on the sticks the same cart was selling.

Something about the name struck Geralt's memory, but he couldn't place it. He had seen his fair share of mummers, players, and tumblers' troupes in his time (and the time was pretty long), but it wasn't an entertainment he particularly sought out. He followed Jaskier to stand on the waist-high wall of a planter with a small tree in it, near the middle of the square. They'd be able to see the whole expanse of stage, wagon, and building, with all the lines and mechanisms, from the slight height.

The story started off with a dramatic duel, fought (passably well, too) with rapiers by the young lover and his dastardly rival. The conflict advanced and retreated across the raised stage, and then, with a gallant flourish (that might get him killed in real combat, Geralt noted, but which looked very fancy), the young lover leapt onto a raised beam and shouted that he'd save his beloved. The dialogue wasn't particularly inspired, but the actor did a lot with it.

The dastardly rival pursued him, all the way across the narrow beam and onto the roof of a porch near the players' wagon. Their fight choreography improved significantly, the more treacherous their footing became. Geralt thought perhaps it became more realistic when they had to consider the danger of their balance.

The young lover's impetuous but loyal friend resolved poignantly in the foreground to help him, despite sharing his love for the fair maid. He was equipped with a bow, which he used, rather expertly to Geralt's eye, to shoot at the dastardly rival, but the plot called for him to tragically hit his friend, so the arrow he loosed ended up clutched dramatically to the breast of the young lover, drenched immediately in vivid heart's blood. Geralt smelled beets, a pretty good color match for arterial spray, and raspberries, probably for the texture. He was impressed with the arrow catch, though. It must have taken a lot of practice, especially with the close timing in the middle of a fairly convincing sword fight.

Now how could the plot progress? The protagonist had been eliminated.

Ah, enter the fair maid.

Geralt stared. It was Eveline Gallo, known professionally (in both acrobatic and cat burglary circles) as The Ermine, specializing in rhythmic gymnastics and tight-rope walking. Apparently she had taken up acting since the last time he saw her. She had an illusion on to hide her elvish features, making Geralt's medallion hum so lightly he hadn't even noticed in the constant motion of the crowd, but it was definitely her. He shifted his weight, prompting Jaskier to look a question at him.

"The Ermine," Geralt muttered to him. 

"She's famous," Jaskier concurred.

"I sort of owe her money," he disclosed.

" _What_?" Jaskier hissed under his breath. A few heads in the crowd turned their way.

"Heist gone bad," Geralt grunted. "She fled, never got her share."

" _Heist_?" Jaskier's incredulous tone was rising.

Eveline was proclaiming her eternal devotion to the slain protagonist and her intention to avenge his foul murder. She wasn't as convincing with a sword in the ensuing duel with the loyal friend, but her flashy flips, kicks, line-walking, and handsprings made up for it. Since her opponent was attempting only to defend himself and not to harm her, she backed him onto the end of the narrow beam. He looked wildly about for an escape and leapt to the porch roof where the protagonist had met his end, and then a small group of players sitting unobtrusively to the side of the wagon began to heighten the action even further with a rousing dramatic song.

Eveline pursued her adversary to the porch roof and then did some spectacular twirls and leaps off of various lines strung about the square to position herself above him on the railing of an overhanging balcony. The music trembled and wailed about their tragic misunderstanding, but underneath it, Geralt could hear the block-and-tackle creaking into motion. The action was on the side of the building, drenched in full, dramatic afternoon sunlight, but in the shadow of the alley the troupe who weren't busy playing the music were hauling rhythmically on lines and adjusting counterweights. The wagon was in the air, halfway up the height of the building, before most of the audience even realized it was moving.

"I can see how she might be useful in a heist," Jaskier observed, watching Eveline showboat on the balcony and the ropes that ran between it and the porch roof. "But don't think we're not having a long talk about exactly what heists you've participated in, upon which subject I am egregiously deficient in composition of rugged narrative ballads."

The Ermine wasn't the only acrobat in the troupe, just the best. The loyal friend, still trying to avoid bringing any harm to his beloved, leapt marvelously from the porch roof to the wagon hanging in the air, making it sway and twist a little as it turned. She followed, catching it on the backswing, and stabbed her rapier through his heart in a way that looked especially effective at the distance they'd made between themselves and the audience. Geralt thought perhaps it was a retracting blade. The pouch of beet and raspberry mess the boy had popped to bleed from dripped convincingly from the edges of the wagon to the cobbles below.

Suddenly, the music stopped, and the dastardly rival appeared at the foot of the stage with the bow strung and an arrow nocked.

Geralt shifted uneasily. This would be a hard shot indeed, considering the swaying of the wagon at its hazardous height, Eveline's wild gesticulation as she declaimed her victory, and the angle of the sun. The wagon was totally backlit, the fair maid and the loyal friend merely stylized silhouettes, which Geralt supposed at least kept the sun out of Eveline's eyes.

The dastardly rival loosed his arrow, aiming, as he said, for the fair maid's heart. 

Too much happened at once.

Eveline leapt straight up from the floor of the wagon, twisting to catch the arrow as it passed her. Geralt's medallion gave a sharp, nasty buzz. Jaskier blinked as a faint shadow passed upwards through him, angled from the ground behind them in the space where people pressed against each other to see around the tree in the planter. Geralt whirled to defend him from the threat on the ground, but even Geralt's fastest grab with his mutated reflexes got him only a few strands of nondescript brown hair and a view of a ripple in the crowd. Jaskier gasped, still watching the stage, and Geralt turned instantly back to see that Eveline's hand had closed around the arrow, but she made a shocked sound as the air was knocked out of her. The reddened fingers of her compatriot reached for her as she staggered, but he was not fast enough. She screamed as she fell from the side of the wagon, longer than Geralt would have thought a fall from that height could last.

She hit the ground with a terrible noise. The audience inhaled in shocked silence.

"So fall all who oppose me!" intoned the dastardly rival, and twirled his cape. He ran to where Eveline lay, swept her up in his arms, and made a swift exit into the alley.

"My love," stuttered the loyal friend shakily from the still-swinging wagon. "My--"

The judges, close to the front, had their hands to their mouths in horror. Geralt couldn't be sure, but it appeared the boy had actually fainted.

He put the hairs in his pocket, met Jaskier's eyes and nodded subtly to the alley. The audience, still hushed, began to applaud in fits and starts.

The actor who had played the villain came back out and took a flamboyant bow, then raised his hands for quiet. "The Falling Stars Wandering Circus thanks you, worthy gentlefolk. Our play is ended, a little differently from how we planned."

A crewman from the block-and-tackle shinned up one of the lines tied to the porch roof to see to the actor still lying on the incrementally descending wagon. The actor who had played the protagonist followed nimbly, a bottle of smelling salts in his hand. Geralt stepped off the planter wall and handed Jaskier down, making their way steadily to the alley opening, one hand on Jaskier's back.

The villain continued. "I hope that you enjoyed our performance, and I wish to assure you that our fair maid is not seriously hurt." He bowed to the judges. "A diverting Gamut to you all, and my good wishes to the rest of the Players' Run!" He bowed again, and hastened back into the alley.

Geralt and Jaskier beat him to the opening. "Bullshit Eveline's not seriously hurt," Geralt snapped at the villain. "Did you even check her before you picked her up?"

The villain quailed. "Who are you? What do you--"

"Let him in, Petra, fucking fuck," Eveline's voice carried weakly from the alley. "Not like you could stop him. He's a witcher."

Geralt relaxed slightly to hear her speak, but shouldered ungently past the villain, still keeping Jaskier close with a hand at his back.

She was laid out on the lid of a props chest, breathing quickly and shallowly but without any dangerous lung noise, pupils tiny under her irritating illusion. "What's broken? Who's your medic?" Geralt asked her.

"She didn't come with us. Didn't want to do the Gamut," Eveline panted. "Petra knows first aid, but I think this leg may be a little beyond him."

"No shit," Geralt said, looking at her leg. It was facing the wrong direction from the knee down.

"You'd do a ropewalking show with no net and no medic to hand?" Jaskier was incredulous.

"It wouldn't have been dangerous if someone hadn't shot something at her," Geralt assured him. "She doesn't fall."

"Well, she fell." Jaskier smiled tightly. "Lucky for you, we know the best doctor in town," he said to Eveline.

"You won't need your illusion with her," Geralt assured her.

"Forgot I had it on," Eveline said blankly. She was sliding into shock.

"I'm taking her to Shani," Geralt announced to the villain and the crew milling about in the alley. "Harborside, right at the road to the Western Gate." He laid his forearm against her shin, keeping her leg straight, and hoisted her over his shoulder. "Jaskier, walk next to me. Watch her eyes."

"Pleased to meet you, Madame the Ermine," Jaskier chattered to cover his agitation. "The show was magnificent. Derring-do and legerdemain, drama and narrative drive, that arrow catch, those flips, I've never seen such a perfectly elegant ropewalk--"

Eveline wheezed a little. Geralt hurried. Jaskier hurried, too.

Shani was, thankfully, and a little incredibly, at home. She had come back for a late lunch over her paperwork, and when she opened her door to see Eveline slung over Geralt's shoulder with her twisted leg hanging down, braced on his forearm, she opened the door wide without a word, shoved all her food, and her work, off the kitchen table, and nodded to Geralt to set his burden down.

"I can't fix this here, but I can give her something for the pain, and splint it so it doesn't compound," she said calmly, opening drawers and setting bottles, scissors, splints, and bandages on the table next to a worryingly pliant Eveline. "Jaskier, can you get her some water?" She gestured to the cistern at the end of the counter. "Geralt, don't--oh, an illusion focus amulet. Yes, take that off her, please."

It was the work of the rest of the afternoon to get Eveline's leg moved and splinted to Shani's satisfaction before she'd allow Eveline to be moved to the surgery to have her bones put the right way around. Geralt, grim and watchful, handed things to Shani when she asked for them. Jaskier, white-lipped, held Eveline's hand. She didn't pass out, but she wasn't especially coherent.

"Can you think of anyone who would want to hurt you?" Geralt asked, feeling ineffective and insensitive.

"I'm a thief," she said. "And an elf," she added. Jaskier winced as she squeezed his hand. "Dunno who knows that here, though."

It was a troubling plight.

Bereft of even the semblance of helping, Jaskier and Geralt stood on Shani's stoop and watched the stretcher-bearers walk Eveline evenly to the surgery under Shani's direction.

"Shani's a genius, but. That's not going to heal perfectly," Geralt said, his tone leaden. "She's an acrobat. And a cat burglar. This is going to ruin her life."

"Maybe Yenn or Triss could..." Jaskier trailed off, unwilling to contradict himself aloud with how long it would take to get word to any of the sorceresses Geralt knew. "Did either of them give you anything to keep in touch? A talisman? A two-way mirror?"

Geralt didn't answer. He thought of all the reading he had just done in the Oxenfurt Library's collection on magic, and how little it availed him now.

But... Katarzyna had said something in a huff before she left him there. Market Street?

Geralt turned to Jaskier. "Do you know a witch in Market Street?"

Jaskier shook his head. "Anybody who stayed after the last round of Eternal Fire evangelists came through would have had to keep very quiet about their magic."

"Katarzyna knows her. Or she said she did." Geralt was vibrating with the need to do something.

"Well, I do know where to find Katya," Jaskier smiled faintly.

The Players' Run was still in progress as the early spring sunset stained the narrow Oxenfurt skies red as beets. The troupes who had drawn or requested evening judgings lit their stages with mirrored lime lanterns or carried candles, and it gave the square an eerie cast.

Geralt needed but a moment to pick Katarzyna's face out in the glow of the footlights. Tatiana apparently had an important supporting role in the Oxenfurt students' miracle play, so Katya was right at the edge of their wide, low platform.

Jaskier nudged him. "I'll go ask her--"

"We'll both go," Geralt interrupted, unwilling to be separated from Jaskier in the crowd. They'd be conspicuous, but they had to get to her.

Jaskier gave him a long look. "All right," he allowed.

Her face, when they reached her, was white in the unforgiving bleed of the acrid limelight. She looked away from the action on the stage at Jaskier's murmur.

"Katya, dear heart, we've got a question for you. It's important." Jaskier's somber expression looked especially dire, fading red in the diffuse sunset and limned in the white reflecting from the stage.

Katya glanced from Jaskier to Geralt and her heartbeat sped a little. They had appeared from nowhere and Geralt knew his eyes were unsettling in the dark when they reflected light from the side. He turned to look at the stage instead of staring at her.

"I've heard you know somebody in Market Street who can help with particularly vexing problems. Is that right?" Jaskier's voice was low, far beneath the level of the action on the stage, but it rang with authority, and his urgency was unmistakable.

A line appeared between Katya's brows. She glanced again at Geralt. "I didn't mean to snitch. Are you going to report her?" She looked much younger than she had in the library.

Jaskier set a hand over his heart, gesturing to Geralt with the other. "Does that seem like something I would do?"

Katya shook her head.

Geralt cleared his throat quietly, watching the action on the stage. It was a swordfight.

Jaskier took a deep breath. "Maybe you heard about the accident here earlier. Someone was hurt."

Katya nodded.

"We think your friend could really help," Jaskier insisted gently.

Geralt kept his eyes on the stage, but he could hear Katya's heart returning to a calmer tempo. 

She swallowed. "Blue house, the block west of the Hanged Hare."

"Thank you very much, Katarzyna." Jaskier gave her a miniscule nod, but made it seem like a respectful bow. He was capable of subtlety, after all. Not even the people directly around them in the audience had looked away from the play to attend their murmured conversation.

Despite Jaskier's ban from the Hanged Hare, or perhaps because of it, he had no trouble finding it in the labyrinthine district of Market Street, and led Geralt straight there. The last orange light of the sunset washed the roofs of the byways, before dusk rendered all the colors muted in the glow of lamps and torches, but Geralt could immediately tell there was only one blue house on the block, and only the ground-floor facade of the precarious-looking stacked residences was even painted at all, over the whitewashed half-timbers.

Geralt knocked lightly on the door. There was a small delay, and the sound of a low voice calling out to wait a moment, and then the door swung in.

Geralt stared incredulously at the dark-eyed woman looking out.

She stared back. "Geralt?"

Geralt cleared his throat. "Hi, Aïk."

Jaskier swept in with some manners. "I take it you two know each other. My name's Julian Pankratz, known to some as Jaskier. I'm delighted to make your acquaintance," he said, bowing low and taking her hand to kiss it.

"Jaskier--" Geralt started.

Jaskier looked away from her eyes at the hand he held. It was upside-down. Her palm was facing up, attached to the wrist in the opposite direction from her forearm. It didn't look painful, or broken, exactly, but it was definitely not the same as anyone else's hand.

Without missing a beat, Jaskier gently curled her knuckles upwards to brush his lips against them in a perfectly gentlemanly gesture. She smiled.

"I'm pleased to meet you as well, Jaskier. I'm Mozaïk, known to some," and she nodded to Geralt, "as Aïk." She took her hand back and ran it self-consciously over her already-sleek hair. "What brings you to my door?"

Geralt blinked. "Do you still know all that theory about bone repositioning and tissue attachment?"

Mozaïk cast her eyes down and put her backwards hand out of sight behind her.

Jaskier hastened to explain. "A friend is hurt. She fell from a three-story height this afternoon. Her leg turned all the way around at the knee and she depends on agility for her livelihood, and though we rushed her to the best medical care in the kingdom, it's not likely to heal perfectly."

Geralt felt like an insensitive prick. "I know how hard you worked when Coral turned your hand. You did research for years, and a lot of practical experiments, too. I didn't know it was your door I was knocking on when someone told me there was a witch in Market Street, but there's no one better positioned to help."

Jaskier looked at Geralt uncertainly. "I don't mean to pry," he started.

"We used to be close," Geralt cut him off. "I knew her teacher."

"Ah, you knew me pretty well, too," Mozaïk asserted.

"I'm," Geralt hesitated. He closed his eyes. "I'm sorry for what happened to you, and I'm pretty sure it was my fault," he said hoarsely. "I seem to bring you only trouble, but you would be the best help we could bring to our friend. Maybe the only help."

"You also brought me perspective, and helped me make the best choice of my life," she said. "I only went back and finished my studies with Coral because of your letter."

Jaskier huffed. "So you _can_ write letters," he complained, "just not to me."

Mozaïk smiled shyly. "It was an extenuating circumstance," she said. "Why don't you both come in and tell me exactly what happened?"

Geralt's medallion buzzed as he crossed her threshold, but, well, it was the house of a sorceress. Her working space, too, probably.

Her front room was covered in comfortable clutter both personal and professional, with decoctions, tinctures, and potions in carefully labeled bottles and various mystifyingly arcane implements scattered across every available horizontal surface except the actual seats of the four plush chairs. She waved them into the seats and took one herself, settling into the squashy cushion and looking expectantly between them.

"Eveline and I did some business together in Novigrad awhile back," Geralt started.

"Eveline Gallo? The Ermine?" Mozaïk asked, surprised. "I had heard she was on for the Falling Stars in the Players' Run. She fell?"

Geralt nodded. "The job we were on together went south, and she had to bail without getting her cut." He looked at his hands in his lap. "I was just the muscle, but I think that was probably my fault, too. I owe her."

Jaskier looked sympathetic, but also like he wanted so badly to ask about the heist that it physically pained him not to.

"She would never fall on a routine performance, even as prestigious and nerve-wracking a one as the Players' Run. What happened?" Mozaïk leaned forward, setting her elbows on her knees.

"Something pushed her," Jaskier said, frightened. "It came from right behind us and shot up to the wagon where she was standing, and Geralt's so quick he nearly got his hands on whoever did it, but they were gone by the time I turned around."

"She was shot?" Mozaïk asked, confused.

"Well, there was an arrow catch trick she was supposed to do at exactly the same time--"

"She did do it," Geralt interrupted. "She caught it. But that wasn't what pushed her," he insisted. "Whatever it was, it looked like a shadow. It went right through Jaskier."

"It did?" Jaskier looked at him, surprised. "I didn't feel anything."

"You wouldn't, if it was magic aimed specifically at her," Geralt hypothesized. "Maybe they had something of hers to target her with?"

"So the damage is magical?" Mozaïk asked.

"No, only the push. I think the injury is strictly from the fall. But it's really bad. If she doesn't get magical healing on it, I don't think her career as an acrobat will last much longer."

"Or as a thief," Mozaïk murmured knowingly.

Geralt tilted his head in acknowledgement. "I got these hairs when I grabbed for the person who threw... whatever it was. If it helps," he said, taking them carefully out of his pocket and arranging them on his open hand.

She looked at him, touching a fingertip to the shortish, straight brown strands. "That was a good thought. It does very much help," she said. "I can get an image of the person from these. If none of us recognize it, then it might not be too useful to us, but we can make a sketch and see if anyone else knows who it is."

"I can't give you what it's worth now," Geralt admitted, pained, "but I cleared a nest of endregas on the way here and the alderman should have collected enough from the village be able to pay me for it by the end of the Gamut--"

"Hush, Geralt. I'm not charging you." Mozaïk took one of the hairs from Geralt and stood decisively, rummaging through a stack of brass, silver, and copper mirrors on the chest of drawers nearest to her chair. "This won't take long. I want to go see Eveline before the doctors finish working on her."

She selected a brass mirror engraved with geometrical symbols and unstoppered an expensive-looking blue glass bottle to drip a little of the clear liquid in it onto the mirror, tilting it this way and that to fill the lines with the substance. She set the mirror on a tarnished copper stand, green with age, and looked at the highest levels of the shelf lining the wall where the chest-of-drawers stood. She began to reach for a massive quartz point standing precariously upright on the very top shelf, but Jaskier sprang up to offer his help.

"Can I get that for you?" He asked, wisely, before touching the possessions of a sorceress.

"Yes, please," Mozaïk said with a look of mild surprise.

Jaskier reached easily up to retrieve the crystal and handed it to her with a little bow.

"Thank you," she said, setting it in front of the mirror on its own little green copper stand. She made some delicate motions in front of it with the tips of the fingers on her forward-facing hand.

It glowed slightly red. Geralt's medallion got louder.

Jaskier looked fascinated, clearly restraining himself from asking Mozaïk about what she was doing.

An image began to form, not on the surface of the mirror, but projected in front of it. It was a vague and wavy bluish green, just the opposite color of the glow on the mirror. It was the insides of a head, a jumbled and unsettling collection of eyes and teeth and hair and brain and tongue, then it blurred into a smudge vaguely head-shaped, then face-shaped. It resolved into a supercilious face with a flat fringe sticking obstinately to its forehead.

It was Valdo Marx.

Mozaïk and Jaskier gasped at the same time, as though they had rehearsed it for a play.

"He came to me for--" Mozaïk started.

"Why would he want to--" Jaskier interrupted her.

Geralt drew a breath. "Why did he come to you?"

"He wanted a charm to banish sirens. I thought it'd be fine, since they never come this far inland anyway, and he didn't seem the type to go hunting them in their habitat on the shore." She shook her head. "He was very specific. He said, 'sirens, or men of siren descent,' and he seemed to think that was... a thing that happens." 

"Always wondered what it'd be like to have the sirens' gift," Jaskier murmured. "Not that there aren't some excellently flattering rumors about me," he brightened.

Mozaïk looked at Geralt, her brow furrowed. "They're not--they're just winged animals with a similar body structure, they don't breed with people," she said hesitantly.

"There's one legend about a man who had children, but it was with an ekhidna, and hardly anyone with experience of actual sirens or ekhidnas credits it," Geralt confirmed. "They're creatures of the Conjunction. I've never seen any evidence they want anything from a man other than to eat him."

"That's what I thought," Mozaïk said. "The money he offered was very good, and it seemed like a harmless banishment to give him a little white-ribbon amulet for."

"Hm," Geralt considered, thinking.

"But he came back," Mozaïk hissed suddenly, hand to her forehead. The image of Marx faded from the mirror-device. "He wanted another banishment charm, this one stronger, without an amulet. Just a targeted spell he could release. For an elf," she whispered. "He said it was to undo a great injustice."

"He doesn't have a single worthwhile bean to steal, and he's never been important enough--it's not just my opinion, Geralt, it's the truth--he doesn't have anything that could interest a thief of her caliber, and he thinks theatre is a base, vulgar medium. He'd never be caught dead interfering with the Players' Run for the sake of changing the judges' decisions. What could he possibly have against Eveline?"

Geralt put a hand up to quell Jaskier's exclamations. "The first charm he bought, against sirens. And, uh, sirens' children. Would it work on dead ones?"

Mozaïk sat back down in her chair to think. "I guess it would? I didn't delineate any specifics besides the species. I just made it to banish them from his presence, at a range of, um," she pinched the bridge of her nose, "about thirty feet?"

"Would it work on siren parts? Separated from the body?"

She sighed. "I think so. It was pretty strong. I didn't see how it could actually affect anything, since there aren't any here, and I knew he was staying for the Gamut."

Jaskier was watching Geralt, his eyebrows drawn together in a distracted line. "What? What do you think he was doing?"

Geralt hoped he was right. "Guess what kind of glue holds on every kind of wood, even if it's of magical origin?"

Mozaïk looked blank. Jaskier stared, comprehension dawning. "Siren glue?"

"Their vocal cords. You have to boil them a specific way and regrind the powder nine or ten times and it ends up being more trouble than it's worth most of the time, but Skelligers sometimes use it to set their masts because it's so powerful and it won't weaken in saltwater or fresh, even if the wood's from the Druids' glades."

"You think--"

"He wasn't trying to get Eveline. He believed the siren's gift rumors and tried to banish you from the Gamut, and got Toruviel's lute instead."

"Brokilon yew," Jaskier breathed.

"And since it didn't work, he decided you must be part elf instead of a siren, and have your unfair advantage because of your magical heritage." Geralt made a disgusted noise.

"Ah. Unfortunately for Eveline, I don't have any elven magic. I'm just that good."

"So is she," Geralt bristled. "Elves aren't any more reliably magic than humans. He just didn't think you could be playing fair."

Jaskier pursed his lips, a beaming grin threatening to break out. "Are you calling my playing fair?" he asked, trying very hard to keep a straight face.

"I'm going to see Eveline," Mozaïk said, standing suddenly. She took two lengths of ribbon, one green, one white, from the lower shelf, closest to the edge. "This is all my fault." She unraveled the ribbons, and Geralt's ears popped. He guessed the two banishment charms were now broken.

"It's no one's fault but Valdo Marx's," Geralt assured her, shooting a quelling glance at Jaskier. "But she would very much appreciate your help, and so would I."

"And I, too," Jaskier added. "I feel responsible as well. He was aiming at me." He rubbed a hand over his face, now composed as ever. "She'll be in surgery at the School of Medicine, Shani attending. Will you need someone to walk you in?"

"I should be fine," Mozaïk answered, her confidence returning. She drew a key from her sleeve and tossed it to Geralt. "I can go wherever I need to. Lock up when you go, won't you?"

She disappeared. It drew an unpleasant rattle from Geralt's medallion.

Geralt looked at Jaskier. "When is your next competition, again?"

"Day after tomorrow," Jaskier said. "The Chief Singing. I'm in the evening lists."

"Where did you take the lute, when it broke?"

"Rachla the luthier? Siegmund's sister, actually, but the Academy patronizes her on her own merits--"

"I'll be back tomorrow. You, ah, you can lock this," Geralt mumbled, handing Jaskier Mozaïk's key and stepping out of her aggressively magical house with relief.

It was a long run to the Velen Gate stables where he'd left Roach and his extra pack full of...witchering... supplies and proceeds, but time was short, and Roach would be glad to see him anyway.

He had one pair of siren cords left from the defensive slaying he'd had to do on his last trip to see Ciri in the Isles. It would take all night to do nine proper boilings with enough time to dry and regrind between, but he had done it in one night before, and it would be easier over a campfire than it had been on a ship tossing in a squall.

Roach was indeed happy to see him, though less happy to be heading far enough out of the city to light a fire at this time of night, and not at all pleased to be tethered anywhere close to the site of the glue production. The fumes the cords emitted as they boiled meant his toxicity headache returned with a vengeance, and he wished he hadn't used up all his White Honey at the endrega nest on his way southward. It hadn't been enough, anyway; better to have stretched the potion out over a longer time, but he hadn't wanted to miss the opening concert, and riding fast with symptoms of very high toxicity was not at all advisable.

The last boil turned and foamed in the pot over the fire as the dawn crept into the east. Fragments of Essi's poem rattled in Geralt's head, recalling gorge and acid etching throats and ember-baked slag. He felt about like an acid-etched pile of forge leavings, but the task was almost finished. He poured the boiling pot out over a flat wooden tray he usually used for drying herbs, and sat down next to the fire to wave its heated air over the glue with a second tray to dry it. He let himself yawn.

Roach, accustomed to rising at dawn on the Path, was at least not offended to be tacked up at this hour to go back to the stable with a tray of warm and slightly viscous glue balanced over her withers. It didn't smell much anymore.

Geralt pondered waiting for it to dry fully so he could powder it again and put it in something less unwieldy than the tray, but it didn't seem worth it, and no one in the dawn-touched streets of Oxenfurt in the throes of the Bards' Gamut was about to bother a slightly black-veined witcher running full-tilt into the Academy quarter.

Siegmund and Hildegarda were in the Corbel House room when he bounced the door on its hinges, winded. They looked, not undeservedly, perturbed. Siegmund hauled himself up on an elbow in their bed and grunted blearily. "What?"

Geralt set the tray down on the little table and pulled the bag of lute pieces out from under the other bed. Jaskier wasn't there. He must have gone to the surgery. Tess had slept through Geralt's dramatic entrance, sprawling over the whole bed now that she had it to herself.

"Where's Rachla's shop?" Geralt asked Siegmund, gathering the bag and the tray together.

Siegmund let out a confused breath. "Market Street? Across from the Hare?"

Geralt snorted. "Of course." He hoisted the bag over his shoulder. It no longer felt soapily bad. "Thanks," he said to Siegmund as an afterthought. "Sorry."

"Whatever. Shh." Siegmund settled back down.

Geralt left.

Rachla apparently started work early. Her greying hair and lined face were covered in fine, sweet-smelling sawdust when she answered the little red door under her sign, which had no words on it but a beautiful painting of a fiddle. She looked up at him, taken aback. He grimaced at how he must look, the toxicity edging his face with black veins, then tried to smooth out his expression, as grimacing probably made it worse.

"I have a lute emergency," he heard himself say.

"You do, do you?" she asked skeptically.

"Brokilon yew," he clarified. "I have siren cord glue for it."

"Julian's beautiful seven-course?" she brightened, perking up immediately, and looking much friendlier.

"In here," he said, offering her the bag. "The glue's dry enough to flake off this and grind for application," he explained further, wiggling the tray.

She looked skeptically at the glue. "He's in the evening lists tomorrow," she said. "I like to leave skin glues for two days before taking the piece out of braces."

"Siren collagen dries fast," Geralt assured her. "It'll be ready if you have it together twelve hours before he has to play it."

"I'm not rushing the set on a masterpiece like this," she said definitively. "Not even for the Gamut. Not even for Julian."

"It's not broken," Geralt pleaded. "Just--apart."

"It did come together beautifully when he brought it after the accident--or, whatever happened to it. Hardly any adjustment required. Just didn't stick."

"It will, now," Geralt promised.

She looked him in the doubtless objectionable face. "All right. How are you paying? Or will Julian cover it?"

Geralt winced, and it turned into a sway. "That's enough siren glue for fifty instruments," he tried.

Rachla pondered the claim. "Well, it's for a good cause," she said after an increasingly uncomfortable pause. "I'll try it today, as fast as I can." She took the tray of glue and the bag and flitted into the back room of her shop, leaving him standing unsteadily on the step looking at the red door. He sat.

He took a moment before he could make his way back to Corbel House, the courtyard, the door, the bed. Tess was gone, which was good, because he wasn't especially careful falling in.

~

He woke to Jaskier's relentless poking.

"For the sake of the seven liberal arts, Geralt, wake the fuck up and drink this, why didn't you _say_ , you absolute and utter _mess_ , you notarized puttock, you certified clotpole, you complete blanch-pated baggage--"

Geralt coughed a little as the White Honey went down. It worked almost instantly. The lingering pain of the toxicity, unaffected by several nights of sleep and not helped by the remaining endrega venom he hadn't yet processed, cleared like a river retreating from a watershed.

"Where did you get this?" he asked, bewildered. It was expensive.

"You think Shani doesn't know how to make White Honey? I came back after the surgery--Eveline's fine, by the way, Mozaïk fixed her right up after they got all the bones and muscles and tendons and things in the right places, she's just going to be tired for a few weeks, and she says you're even for the heist, which, we _are_ going to talk about, but--I came back to find you all, all grey, and veiny, like you ran out of Swallow and took something that fixes you up faster but fucks you up worse and then realized you didn't have enough White Honey to clean that godsawful muck out of your blood, and that _is_ what happened, isn't it? Melitele, you're a moron," he said, raising his eyes to the low, slanted ceiling above the bed and closing them, extravagantly aggrieved.

"Thanks," Geralt said.

"I know, you don't _need_ anyone, you would have been _fine_ , but I want you to be _better_ than fine, I want you to feel _good_ , and be _happy_ , what an outrageously unreasonable ambition it is, I know, I've always aimed high--"

Geralt pulled him into a hug, dislodging him from the chair and toppling him into the bed on top of himself. "I do feel good," he said, barely, into Jaskier's hair. "I am happy."

He could feel Jaskier smiling against his collarbone. He didn't stop for quite awhile, and he got heavier and heavier.

"So, the heist," Jaskier prompted.

Geralt cleared his throat. "Well, a stranger hired me to put together a crew to get a fancy box out of the vault at the Borsody Auction House," he started.

Jaskier picked his face up and stared. "The Borsody Auction House," he repeated. "You pulled a heist at the Borsody Auction House."

"It worked, too. We got what we went in for. But we got overrun and Eveline had to bail or be caught."

"You're the reason their premiums are fifteen times what they were. You know they're considering moving the House to Oxenfurt." Jaskier went dramatically limp.

"What, you don't want to hear the salacious details?" Geralt poked him in the temple.

"Well, are there any?" Jaskier took his face back out of Geralt's collarbone to look at him.

"Nah," Geralt said, considering. "The Borsody Brothers about killed each other over it, but the story's not really that interesting. Mozaïk, on the other hand," he started.

"I knew it! I knew she had a thing for you! The sorceresses always do! You're a magic magnet! Did you save her from her horribly abusive teacher?"

Geralt sobered. "I made her teacher too jealous, I think. And when Mozaïk took my side, her teacher turned her hand around. I really caused her a lot of trouble," he concluded. "And then I told her to go back to finish her apprenticeship," he sighed.

"It seems to have worked out for her," Jaskier offered.

"Hm," Geralt equivocated.

"Well, it's working out for Eveline," Jaskier calculated. "And me."

There was a knock at the door.

"Come in, it's open," Jaskier yelled, unfortunately close to Geralt's ear. "Did you forget your key?"

Valdo Marx stepped under the slant of the stairwell and into the room, a silver knife in his hand. Geralt stared.

Jaskier stared, too.

"I knew it. A monster, consorting with a monster-hunter. How poetic, in your vulgar, common way," Marx accused in measured, polished tones. He advanced with implacable aplomb. "Silver is for monsters, as we all know, thanks to your grubby little tunes," he proclaimed, and raised the knife, telegraphing his downward stab dreadfully.

"Julian, do you want pork and apple or mushroom cheese sticks for lunch? I got steak for Geralt since he's poorly," Tess called as she walked under the stairs with Siegmund and Hildegarda in tow. She stopped short at the sight of Marx standing over the bed with a knife, his wrist caught in Geralt's grip.

"Thus ends the career of the Troubadour of Cidaris," remarked Hildegarda. "Dear, could you ask the porter to bring some prison guards? Make sure they have manacles," she requested of her husband.

"You're done," Geralt informed Marx, and took the silver knife from his hand. It was a nice one. Nothing fancy, but nice. Not even poisoned.

Geralt rose from the bed, folded Marx's hands behind his back, and held them there with one hand, marching him out of the room, past Tess and Hildegarda, who each shuffled awkwardly out of his way, then followed after him. Jaskier brought up the rear, clutching the Borsody case to his chest.

"This man tried to rob me," Jaskier decried dramatically in the general direction of the porter, who was already looking dire, in conversation with Siegmund. "Look at the knife he had! He tried to kill me for my lute! Help! Murder! Thief!"

The word of a don, three professors, and a witcher was enough to weigh against that of the founder and director of the Valdo Marx Choir of Novigrad. Jaskier watched with grim satisfaction as his rival was hauled away in chains. Geralt was more baffled than satisfied.

"I was trying to figure out how to look for him," Geralt admitted at Jaskier's look. "But he just came right to you."

"He probably went to my rooms at the School first," Jaskier remarked. "They'd know where I'm bunked for the Gamut. The hour's late for a third attempt if he started trying right after Eveline fell."

"He kept coming," Geralt repeated, stuck.

"I guess ten years was too long to ignore how much better I am than him." Jaskier shuddered. "Glad he found me when he did. I don't think he's especially skilled with a knife, but that could still have gone badly for me."

"I thought I had to find him. I was going to ask Mozaïk to track him. I thought about it a lot, last night."

"That's another thing, you incomprehensible man," Jaskier pouted.

"Not a man," Geralt muttered.

"All right, if you insist, you incomprehensible mutant. Where did you go? Why succumb to overtoxicity?"

"Ha," Geralt smirked. "Come and see."

The walk to Market Street was prettier in the daytime, Geralt decided. The trees in the richer houses' small front gardens cast a dappled shade over the street between the frequent green park squares, and the different-colored glazes on the clay roof tiles gleamed in the sun. An early-flowering gean-cherry was dropping white blooms in the arch that separated Market Street from their alley approach, and a boy stood picturesquely under it selling roast chestnut sticks. Geralt got one, to reinforce the steak lunch Tess had so considerately brought him. He looked at the nuts, thinking of Jaskier's hair in the sun.

Rachla's door was open when they reached it, emitting much fainter fumes than Geralt had tolerated overnight. 

Jaskier looked askance at him. "No," he denied. "What? You didn't."

"She said she could do it in time for tomorrow," Geralt said.

"I said I'd try," Rachla's voice filtered from the back room. "Come see your lady, Julian, she's recovering."

Only a lifetime of conditioning to move carefully around instruments prevented Jaskier from flailing in his dash into the luthier's shop. Geralt let the corner of his mouth curl as he followed more sedately.

"What kind of meetings are you skipping to watch glue dry?" Geralt inquired of Jaskier, who was poring over the table where Rachla had reassembled Toruviel's lute under the consistent pressure of a series of padded vises. She was minutely adjusting the height of the little bony-looking strip where the strings usually came down from the pegs, measuring it with a tiny, strangely-shaped ruler and a blunt-footed compass.

"I front-loaded the week. Life in academia's not _all_ meetings and responsibiities," Jaskier grinned up at him. "I can't take too much of it at once, you know. Got to get out on a Path sometimes, wrest free of the tedium of city life."

"Maybe," Geralt allowed. "Aren't you going to practice before your Gamut?"

"Yes. On this very fancy, expensive lute right here," he said, indicating the Borsody case at his feet, "And then you and I are going to take it back to Novigrad a day early, because Roach loves me and will not mind a half-day of double riders."

"Mhm," Geralt opined skeptically.

"And then we are going to finish the last keg of beer in the room over a round of gwent, and then we are going to the Concours Hall to see Priscilla show us all what real art is."

"Oh," Geralt said, surprised.

"She'll be magnificent and inspiring and encouraging and then I'll sleep perfectly assured I will play my heart-catching best, because I've been practicing for tomorrow since we met, and I am damn near ready, whether or not this lady is," he declared passionately, nodding at the lute on the table. "I'll play a heinous piece of luthier's trash if I have to. I'll spend an hour tuning. I know what I'm doing."

"I see," said Geralt. He believed it.

**Author's Note:**

> The canonical timeline, games or books, is a cherrypicked mess here. I'm completely ignoring the Redanian war, so Oxenfurt can be a festival site long enough after the boys met to know each other well; I took the characters I liked out of some fun plot arcs, and ignored the context of the plots those arcs form. Don't worry about it.
> 
> The Bards' Gamut is a conflation and adaptation of several real Medieval European music competitions and some I invented. The Concours and the Poesy Trial are based on the Eisteddfod, a Welsh competition of literature, music, and performance dating to at least 1176 that has been revived since the decline of the bardic tradition; I know about it from the choral perspective, so that's what I've incorporated. The Chief Singing and the Arguments are both a combination of Minnesinger rules, which were 12th-14th-century German (lesser) nobles performing for their own class with increasingly elaborate formal principles for poetic and musical composition, and Meistersinger rules, which developed in the middle/merchant class out of the same tradition in the 14th-16th centuries and extremely technically-constrained song contests (sometimes open to anyone, even people not belonging to the song guild), the most rivalrous of which can, not entirely ridiculously, be analogized to rap battles. The Players' Run is based on the tradition of mystery plays in England and Spain, for which guilds of various professions put together a dramatic performance of a particular religious story, and the stories were performed consecutively, sometimes on pageant wagons, on a festival day. I made up the Pipers' Battle, though it does somewhat resemble a combination of the events American high school bands compete in and the kind of Balkan barn dance I used to play for in Boston.


End file.
